Welcome to Digital Marginalia
About Digital Marginalia, books, and future plans.
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.
This space had a different name and scope. The newsletter will include ideas from the initial plan—book recommendations and discussions—and introduce new ones that will expand its topics and reach.
The newsletter will be distributed via ButtonDown and archived on my website.
Here, on Substack, I will share selections from the future editions.
To gain full access, subscribe below:
What can you 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 margins 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 for 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 improve them.
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.