Reading Between the Lines

To annotate is to engage, to create meaning, to connect ideas and forms. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, annotations are explanations or comments added to a text, document, or diagram. However, they are much more than that. They are a dialogue between creator and observer, shaping how we see and interpret information. They are not merely an act of reading but an act of thinking. Annotating means intervening, creating, and layering knowledge.
The term derives from the Latin annotare, “to mark.” Historically, annotation deepened and clarified meaning: marginal notes in medieval manuscripts, glosses on religious texts, wide margins expected to be filled with comments. Today, it has shifted to the digital margins: metadata, comments in code, datasets; elements mostly hidden from view but performing the real work of structuring and interpreting data.
If annotations are the act of marking, observing and reinterpreting, visualisations are their structural twin: the act of making something visible. For too long, visualisations have been seen as a polished means to an end. We see graphs as facts because they look scientific, because they seem to present a neutral point of view. If instead we considered them as annotations, we would embrace their subjective, never-finished nature, and extend their aesthetic possibilities beyond charts and tabular data. Visualisations become indexes: notes and collages of different material which, put together, indicate something. Annotation becomes a methodology.
This talk looks at both through a series of recent projects, tracing how marking, layering, and (re)constructing a source shape what it is allowed to mean. Annotations exist at the margins, open to reinterpretation. They resist closure, and insist that knowledge is always in motion.

The talk is organized within the Creative Technologies Lab Series at Digital Fabrication Lab of SUPSI curated by Dr. Serena Cangiano, principal at MetaLab Basel (head prof. Dr. Aylin Tschoepe)