About
Welcome to Reading Re/Marks, a publication and companion to Remi Kalir's book Re/Marks on Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice (MIT Press, 2025).
Re/Marks on Power is a scholarly effort to read histories of annotation and discern more participatory and just social futures written by the addition of notes to texts. In an era defined by social media and societal discord, the book examines how the norms and necessities of annotation have shifted amid new expressions of readership, agency, and critical literacy.
And, as a complement to the book, Reading Re/Marks is a hub for commentary and community. Welcome, annotators.
Join Reading Re/Marks
As a subscriber, you will:
- Get full access to this website and a regular email newsletter that explores our annotated words and world
- Join a community of annotators, and annotation-curious readers, interested in the critical and creative addition of notes to texts
Reading Re/Marks brings together, and helps to sustain, a community of readers interested in the enduring power and possibility annotation. If that includes you, please consider:
- Subscribing to Reading Re/Marks
- Recommending Reading Re/Marks to friends and colleagues
- Ordering and reading Re/Marks on Power
- Sharing examples of your re/marks
Annotation on Tap
Reading Re/Marks is, and will always be, an openly accessible publication. The regular email newsletter and the full archive of posts will not be paywalled.
Reading Re/Marks features various types of posts, including:
- Short essays about critical and creative annotation
- Subscriber-submitted examples of re/marks (please share!)
- Interviews with annotators
- Guest posts by annotators
- Updates about Re/Marks on Power
- Reviews of annotation-related books and scholarship
Know an annotator who should be featured in Reading Re/Marks? Please email me any recommendations, as well as your questions and comments.
A Note About Images
Unless indicated otherwise, I took all the photographs that appear on Reading Re/Marks. Like this one:
Subscriber-submitted photographs for "Requesting Re/Marks" posts are credited as such (and thank you for sharing and permitting my use of your images).
The topographical map featured in the background of Reading Re/Marks' Home page is my photograph of a map of Tijuana that shows the international boundary between Mexico and the US; thanks to Carlos Alberto Flores Martinez and Juan Antonio Hernandez Ambriz of Archivo Histórico de Tijuana for their assistance while I researched Re/Marks on Power. Here we are:
The featured images I created for Reading Re/Marks use pages from Elements of Economics: A Textbook for Secondary Schools, by Charles Ralph Fay, published in 1926. The book's inside front cover features a few annotations, including one inscription from 1929 that's nearly a century old:
A Note about Tech
Domain thanks to Reclaim Hosting.
Design and platform thanks to Ghost.