What is Marginalia?
Marginalia is an annotation and publishing platform that encourages writing in the margins. It takes annotations, footnotes, tangents, and asides, and makes them equally important to the main text. Writings in the margin help us understand texts better, but also find original traces of ideas, similar to how hyperlinks lead us to unexplored resources.
Why did you start it?
We struggled to find adequate tools for collaborative use. The ones that were offered to us were imposed by Big Tech companies and geared towards efficiency and productivity. We needed tools that are suitable for non-linear, messy, playful, entangled and not often recognized knowledge creation that comes with collectivity. This became clear to us during a research fellowship with ARK collective and led us down the rabbit hole of marginal writing, and we decided to make a tool that put the margins at the centre.
Who or what inspired you?
Most notably Marginality as a site of resistance written by bell hooks and the A Feminist Server Manifesto 0.01 from the Feminist Server Summit. Both impacted us to think about Marginalia as a tool that could implement feminist principles, both on a tech and social level. So, for instance, the platform was built to be sustainable and accessible, it’s lightweight, can be self-hosted and the design has accessibility features, legible typography, and customizable parameters.
Design-wise, we celebrate this entangled and collective train of thought that doesn’t always aim for clarity, since this kind of designed clarity often flattens and simplifies. Instead of triumphing the individual author who creates a clear linear narrative, a lot of knowledge with Marginalia is created in dialogue with others, instead of in a vacuum. We made it free and open-source so it can continue evolving with a community that has a use for it.