Digital Marginalia is a newsletter about community, marketing, tech, and culture and how they influence each other.
Hello! I’m Daniel Prindii and this is Digital Marginalia: a monthly newsletter about community, marketing, tech and culture and how they influence each other.
If you like this email, please forward it to a friend. And if you’re not subscribed, sign up here. Thanks for reading!
Good to find you here. These days, almost everyone has a newsletter. In our noisy digital informational landscape having a direct way, non-algorithmically, to readers and peers is a necessary step for one’s sanity. It’s true that even using this medium, we can become overwhelmed by information and get our attention divided.
But, you can use a tool like Omnivore to receive, read, and annotate your subscriptions. You can read them at your own pace, and get them out of your regular inbox. (Disclaimer: I’m working with Omnivore, and this is not a paid ad).
What you can find in Digital Marginalia?
In this newsletter, you will find community advice, best practices, and researched ways to build them. I aim to bring my expertise in user research, marketing, and information architecture to help you understand how people communicate or interact with a campaign, brand, or idea, or how to search for information, advice, and support in a digital space.
I will add the occasional recommendations: books, podcasts, or blogs.
Why Digital Marginalia?
Marginalia are notes, annotations, and critiques made in the margin of books or documents. Marginalia is a good description of what most of us are doing when learning, and researching: notes on physical books, sticky notes on documents, digital annotations on articles, blogs, and social posts.
Think of this newsletter as a centralized digital medium of annotations. Probably, in time, this newsletter will evolve. Let’s find out!
I’ll leave you with two book recommendations.
The first recommendation is “How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information: Commonplace Books, Scrapbooks, and Albums” published by Oxford University Press, 2022.
Jillian Hess, Ph.D, is a professor of English and her book offers an “investigation into the relationship between technology, knowledge production, information management, and literary forms.”
Find it here.
The other recommendation is “Living in Information. Responsible Design for Digital Places”, published by Rosenfeld Media in 2018.
Jorge Aranjo, the author, is an Information Architect and Strategist Designer. His book explains how we interact with information spaces, like apps, and websites, and how to make them better.
Find it here.
Until next time.
PS: The main image is a detail from a book of hours, France 15th century. Manchester, John Rylands University Library, Latin MS 162, fol. 169v.