I just had the realisation while highlighting my printed eReserve copy of the chapter “Good Connections” from Negroponte’s Being Digital that we’re doing it all wrong. Here I am working with carbon toner on dead trees, and petroluem based (possibly toxic)highlighter to mark-up a document that was once digital.

What is worse than that the document, itself copied from a bound paperback and stored electronically, contains almost zero useful metadata to tell me about its source or content. This makes it particularly difficult to manage in my bibliographical tool Zotero. I have the choice of recreating the metadata or selecting a citation from Google Scholar and editing it to suit.

Negroponte implores us to find the structure in signals. There is a semantic distinction between the between the form of words on a page and the underlying structure.