3 ms·

The Medieval Origins of the Modern Footnote

41 points by benbreen 12y ago

slvv 12y ago
Erik Kwakkel is awesome. For more on the history of footnotes, check out Anthony Grafton's The Footnote: A Curious History (http://www.amazon.com/The-Footnote-A-Curious-History/dp/0674307607 http://www.amazon.com/The-Footnote-A-Curious-History/dp/0674...) There's also Chuck Zerby's book, The Devil's in the Details.
- benbreen 12y ago
  I love Anthony Grafton! He's basically the last of the 17th century polymathic scholars, which is fitting because that's precisely what he studies. Academics have recently been having a debate about putting footnotes online which seems apropos here: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/665-wait-your-footnotes-are-in-cyberspace https://chroniclevitae.com/news/665-wait-your-footnotes-are-...
  - slvv 12y ago
    Great article you posted, lots to think about. I can really see online footnoting being a great approach for university textbooks (which are often already long), particularly because undergrads seem less likely to be engaging thoroughly with the notes anyway. For monographs, where more readers are more likely to be reading the notes along with the rest of the text, I'm less sure about moving to online. Definitely a conversation worth having! Thanks for sharing the article.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    A centralized URL is likely to go offline long before all decentralized physical copies of a book. A scholarly article without footnotes is like source code without git/mercurial history. Like the long tail in search, it's not about frequency of access, but the force of accountability that footnotes exert upon the main text.
wtbob 12y ago
It's fascinating to think of the mediæval scribal system as a really, really low-bandwodth Wikipedia, with thousands of men over centuries passing notes and slowly developing the corpus of information which underlies of modern civilisation. Who were those scribes who wife each of those letters with a precision which would be the envy of an 80s dot-matrix printer? What were their hopes and dreams? Could they have imagined an age like ours?

41 points by benbreen 12y ago

slvv 12y ago

Erik Kwakkel is awesome. For more on the history of footnotes, check out Anthony Grafton's The Footnote: A Curious History (http://www.amazon.com/The-Footnote-A-Curious-History/dp/0674307607 http://www.amazon.com/The-Footnote-A-Curious-History/dp/0674...) There's also Chuck Zerby's book, The Devil's in the Details.

benbreen 12y ago
I love Anthony Grafton! He's basically the last of the 17th century polymathic scholars, which is fitting because that's precisely what he studies. Academics have recently been having a debate about putting footnotes online which seems apropos here: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/665-wait-your-footnotes-are-in-cyberspace https://chroniclevitae.com/news/665-wait-your-footnotes-are-...
- slvv 12y ago
  Great article you posted, lots to think about. I can really see online footnoting being a great approach for university textbooks (which are often already long), particularly because undergrads seem less likely to be engaging thoroughly with the notes anyway. For monographs, where more readers are more likely to be reading the notes along with the rest of the text, I'm less sure about moving to online. Definitely a conversation worth having! Thanks for sharing the article.
- walterbell 12y ago
  A centralized URL is likely to go offline long before all decentralized physical copies of a book. A scholarly article without footnotes is like source code without git/mercurial history. Like the long tail in search, it's not about frequency of access, but the force of accountability that footnotes exert upon the main text.

wtbob 12y ago

It's fascinating to think of the mediæval scribal system as a really, really low-bandwodth Wikipedia, with thousands of men over centuries passing notes and slowly developing the corpus of information which underlies of modern civilisation. Who were those scribes who wife each of those letters with a precision which would be the envy of an 80s dot-matrix printer? What were their hopes and dreams? Could they have imagined an age like ours?