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For As Long As There Have Been Printed Books, There Has Been Marginalia
April 7, 2021
“The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.”
–Toni Morrison, 1993 Nobel Lecture
In 1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import.” In her Nobel Lecture, she noted how language, whether spoken or written, can limn, or describe and detail, life. Derived from the Latin
illuminare, meaning to “make light” or “illuminate,” limn has been used throughout literary history to generally describe and convey the literal illustration of a manuscript. One affordance of annotation is that it enables readers and writers to limn, or describe, their texts. In doing so, how does such annotation provide information?