The goal of marginalia.

I approach the issue of marginalia as someone who knows that lots of interesting stuff can be found in unofficial formats. Just because it's scribbled in the margins instead of printed in the "official" text doesn't mean that a piece of information doesn't have value. I tend to forget that different professions have different definitions of information, and that the question of marginalia can be important to them as well.

To Jon Udell, for instance. Udell is (as the InfoWorld web site tells us) "lead analyst at the InfoWorld Test Center". He deals with a wide variety of issues, but judging from most of what I've read of his writing, his community of readers veers towards engineers and programmers. Still, our interests certainly seem to intersect. In a recent column he notes:

The fuzzy intersection of official and unofficial data has never been a comfort zone for information technologists. In chapter 4 of Klaus Kaasgaard's Software Design and Usability, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) alumnus Austin Henderson says that “one of the most brilliant inventions of the paper bureaucracy was the idea of the margin.” There was always space for unofficial data, which traveled with the official data, and everybody knew about the relationship between the two.

Udell goes on to examine a few of the possible methods of permitting digital marginalia, though he notes (apparently with dismay):

But there’s no universal concept of a margin, and no standard way to embed marginalia that will always travel with a document.

Whether or not that's a cause for disappointment, I'm still thankful for the distinction between official and unofficial data. It's a good one.

Go to: Yes, but how?, or
Go to: In the margins of cyberspace.