My Color-coding System for Reading Annotations
As a little activity the day before I start my internship with Siemens, I'd like to post in my blog about a topic of special importance to me: My color-coding system for reading annotations. This system started when I got a sticky note booklet from my dad many years ago, which had page markers of five different colors: yellow, green, red, pink, and blue. Here I will explain the use I give to each color, with examples from a couple of books I have read (especially from Mikiso Hane's Japan: a Short History, since it's the one I am reading now ^_^).
Yellow: Interesting, might check later
Yellow is probably the one I use the most. I use it to mark insightful information that I believe might come in handy if I ever go back to the book. In Japan: A Short History, for instance, I use it a lot to mark key historical facts, such as the genealogy of Jinmu, the legendary first emperor, or to remember dates, like the duration of periods, wars, etc. (mainly because I have a terrible memory when it comes to history...)
Green: Agree / Supports my argument
As intuitive as it seems, I use green to mark points that support my argument. Honestly, I mainly use this for scientific literature, especially in my field of research: things that back up a point I'm already making, or methodology and results I want to cite or reuse directly.
Red: Disagree
Following the trend of obvious colors, I use red for statements or lines of reasoning I disagree with or believe are fallacious. I normally do not use red annotations in academic books on topics I am not familiar with (e.g. I have no reason to disagree with Mikiso Hane on the cultural reasons behind the rise of Buddhism during the Kamakura period, because I have no knowledge of the topic). However, for topics I have doubts about, I use pink instead, as I will explain next.
A book whose foundational pages are packed with red annotations is Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness. In her attempt to establish the grounds of her objectivist ethics, Rand takes "life" as the standard of value, a clumsy attempt to dodge the is-ought problem: the fact that an organism needs values in order to survive doesn't logically establish that it ought to value survival. Her definition of altruism as the duty of self-sacrifice is also a straw man as big as a cathedral (as we say in Spanish). Any person with a basic knowledge of game theory would laugh in Rand's face after hearing that altruism requires self-immolation. Funny enough, most of the arguments in her essays rest on these ill-posed principles, so at a certain point I had to stop marking sentences in red because I did not want to run out of markers. I may have slandered Rand's work a little bit too much here, but if I had to write down everything I disagree with in her work, an entire blog wouldn't be enough.
Pink: Confusing, internal inconsistency in the text
Pink might not be the best-fitting color for this purpose (I had to use it for something), and if the color palette were more to my liking I would have chosen orange. I use it mainly to highlight information I do not really understand and need to learn more about, or something that sounds confusing or even inconsistent with other points in the book. It is not exactly something I disagree with, but something that makes me doubt and that I would like to recheck, or read about in another source, to make sure it is correct — or at least that I am understanding it correctly (that is why I wanted it to be a color close to red). Being fairly honest, this is probably the color most subject to interpretation.
As an example, I will hate on Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness one last time (in this entry). I have marked in pink a point where she argues that emotions are not tools of cognition: that they are mere downstream products of one's premises, correct or incorrect, and not a valid guide to truth or morality. I did not mark it in red because I do not directly oppose this idea; my problem was one of consistency. She writes that, and yet her own writing is famously passionate, moralizing and rhetorically charged, treating her own intense reactions (disgust at altruism, admiration for entrepreneurial heroes) as if they tracked moral truth self-evidently. Inconsistencies might be good when writing complex characters in fiction, as they illustrate psychological depth, but they are not when writing philosophical essays, and that is why once again Rand gets the pin of shame, now pink-colored.
Blue: Connects to something else (another book, paper, idea, etc.)
I believe reading alone does not guarantee the acquisition of knowledge: someone may have read a thousand books and not retained a single teaching. And even if they have, they might not be able to relate the teachings of each book to one another to build a larger set of thoughts and beliefs. My attempt to achieve the latter is the color blue: I use it to connect any interesting finding or idea I have read to things I have read in other books or papers, so that whenever I have time I can build a better understanding of it and deepen my knowledge.
An example from Japan: A Short History (again) is when the author explains that the fourth and fifth centuries were characterized by an influx of immigrants from Korea and China, thus introducing many aspects of Chinese culture to Japan. That resonated with a genetic study I had come across on ancient DNA from the Yayoi and Kofun periods, which points to a similar conclusion through an entirely different discipline: rather than the Kofun-period population being a straightforward, gradual continuation of the earlier Yayoi population, the genomic data reveals a distinguishable, later influx of continental ancestry arriving during the Kofun period itself, right within the window Hane describes in the text. A blue post-it here let me connect the historian's narrative account, built from written records and archaeology, to a completely independent line of evidence (population genetics) that, combined, allow me to better understand the big picture.
That's the whole system. It is not particularly sophisticated, and half of it comes down to which colors happened to be in the booklet, but it works for me, and Ayn Rand has paid the price for it.