Constructing richer readings

Since reading Liu et al. - 2026 - Creative Reading|”Creative Reading”, I’ve become interested in “readings” as artifacts and concrete representations. What surfaces, tools, notations, mediums can/should we use to make sense of a text, construct our individual reading, connect it with our prior thought, and (in the best case) transform the self?

The simplest form is just an annotation layer on top of the original text: a highlighter, maybe text in the margins. All the way at the other end of the spectrum might be an original published essay which synthesizes and builds upon several texts. What’s in the middle? The most obvious answers look like notes in a journal or PKM with excerpts quoted. How might we do better?

• BookGrid
• BookLeap and QuoteLeap
• Making a poster, e.g.
  • Liu et al. - 2026 - Creative Reading|Creative Reading
  • Hugh’s boundary objects poster
  • /Sketchnotes
• Related: Physical computing projects

Historical references

• Marcel Proust’s paperoles
• Thomas Jefferson’s bible
• Montaigne’s dense marginalia in his Essais manuscript
  • 

Machiavelli, Letter to Francesco Vettori (1513):

When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reasons for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them.

Sketchnotes

An interesting line of reference…

Robert Dimeo has many beautiful examples and wrote a NIST report on his practice.

Sacha Chua has many exemplary examples.

Log

• 2026-09-04: Reactions sometimes precede attachment or classification. If I’ve come up with a color coding system for ink, I don’t necessarily know the right color when I start writing. I might think through the comment before deciding exactly where it wants to attach.
• 2026-09-07: My earlier work (BookGrid, BookBridge, Annotation extraction and fusion) focuses on extracting a single reading’s reactions. But I want a medium that would give me an opportunity to expand those into a deeper reading.
• 2026-09-14: Physicality gives a few separate benefits: tactility, expressive range, room to spread out, spatiality. Some of these can maybe be recovered digitally.
• 2026-09-15: Excerpting operations should be able to carry my markings, too.
• 2026-09-17: Backlinks to excerpts must be able to navigate back to the source text and also to any posters/interpretations that use it.
• 2026-09-18: Visual texture is important for orientation; it isn’t just decoration or mess.
• 2026-09-??: I want to free myself of the author’s structure, while remaining oriented to it.
• 2026-10-04: In making the “Liu et al. - 2026 - Creative Reading|Creative Reading” poster, the main value was the understanding produced in making it, not the artifact itself. (Kidd - 1994 - marks are on the knowledge worker|The marks are on the knowledge worker).
• 2026-10-04: Deep mutability of the “Liu et al. - 2026 - Creative Reading|Creative Reading” poster isn’t really important; the key story is probably around using it to make a new poster, e.g. which connects several previous papers.
• 2026-10-06: I want to be able to see the whole, but somehow still to be able to access the structure and content of the original text.
• 2026-10-09: How to bridge a scholarly workflow from expressive in-situ reactions to a material that can be used for elaboration, synthesis, idea development, etc over time? (see ==question inventory==)
• 2026-10-10: I want to create linked digital/physical representations of a poster which enable (relatively) smooth movement across that divide.