Annobotted Bibliodiary is an ongoing collaboration with myself (in time), and the material I have been reading, hearing, seeing or noticing recorded, and therefore recalled through a variety of prompts that use the slack platforms’s ‘slackbot’ function. By choosing important or menaningful passages or excerpts, and assigning the slackbot to recall them for me using a term, phrase or description which I have programmed them to be associated with, I am able to continually be in conversation with past ideas in the present term. The slackbot provides a a format for a diary that engages the present through my own past understanding and imagination, but also is a precarious kind of mechanized recall, dependent upon the platforms programming and the potential dissolution of this programming should their be any modification of the protocol, or availability of a distributed extension of my thought.
Annobotted Bibliodiary provides a conversation similar to that of a classroom, and has been a useful tool because I am someone who almost exclusively learns through the process of externalizing thought in conversation because the platform allows for a temporally removed witnessing of my own processing, articulation, and assembly of ideas that are both mine through a designation of programmed activity – and yet otherwise unavailable to my memory which is decidedly less interested in specificity and challenged to recall generally.
During the conditions of a pandemic in which conversational opportunities were limited to less improvisatory spaces such as zoom, the Annobotted Bibliodiary supplemented the opportunities for spontaneous thought in relationship to material that my intuition has designated as holding potential significance, but which may not be entirely explored or understood – and potentially offer opportunities to future understanding.
