Last week I had a dissertation workshop where I presented a rough draft of my chapter on Social Annotation. I was feeling pretty vulnerable about it. Not only is the draft in its infancy, but it also combines a few disciplines that aren't typical for projects in English studies.

To give some background---I'm developing a digital annotation tool that has a multi-color highlighter for teaching purposes. I'm hoping that the colors will help students to engage their immediate and embodied responses to reading, which happen prior to their articulation in language. Basically, I'm hoping that using colors will allow readers to mark their reactions to reading by assigning certain reactions to specific colors. The point, for me, is to explore alternative kinds of annotation, particularly annotation that short circuits verbalized forms of response. My paper on this project (which will be fully drafted once I use the tool in the classroom) interweaves my narrative of the tool's technical development with discourses on educational technology and neuroscience. I'm trying to show the ways that current annotation tools track or quantify student data, and how looking at reading from a neuroscientific lense, particularly from the perspective of embodied cognition, opens up the way we understand students' engagement with text. To better display this engagement, I created the highlighter with really low color opacities that facilitates layering. I imagine that different readers will highlight with different colors over the same piece of text. My idea is that the color-highlighter's layering capability will create a kind of "heatmap" of the text, which manifests in new color combinations. This palimpsest of readings will (I hope) show student reactions in contrast.

Most of the feedback I got from the group was really useful. There were comments about the structure, foregrounding the experimental nature of the project, and rethinking how I interweave my development notes (which everyone agreed should be included). There were also specific terms and concepts I need to clarify, like embodiment (what do I mean by "prediscursive" and what kind of affect theory is this) and color frameworks.

The most challenging comment was about stakes. One of the workshop participants went on at length about needing to explain why this tool is useful. Here were some of the questions:

• What do I want out of this tool?

• What am I doing that's different from using actual highlighters in books?

• Why should instructors care which neurons are firing?

• Why is the student’s affective experience important?

• Who is my audience? Which conversations do I want to insert myself into?

I tried to answer some of these questions in the moment. Mainly my answer for the "why" is that if we [English scholars] don’t guide this conversation it will be guided for us, by the tech companies. If we [the educators] don't think about how our tools work we will use them uncritically, and our students will become a source of data collection rather than aesthetic production. I have some language to this effect in the introduction, but I guess it's understated. I also tend to assume that everybody thinks like me and already knows that edtech is evil.

But then, afterward, I got to thinking about it. And how absurd it is that I was asked to defend the utility of my work. Nobody else in the workshop is being asked these questions---at least not that I have noticed. Only my project, the sole technical project, has this burden. Why should I have to explain myself, when my colleagues, who are mostly doing non traditional work on archives, melancholia, music, composition studies, ventriloquisim, aren't being asked to do the same?

Even though the majority of my classmates' projects aren't "traditional," there's an implicit agreement that the exploratory nature of their scholarship is inherently important. Their choices about objects of study or methods aren't questioned. Why should I have to explain my decisions? Why can't I just tell you what I'm thinking?