ABSTRACT
This could be a difficult chapter, given its focus on the small-print attributions of the footnote. This twelfth-century invention of the monk’s scriptorium may seem an unlikely topic for a work dedicated to improving public access to scholarship through new technologies. After all, publishers today believe that nothing puts a potential reader off faster than the sight of footnotes scurrying along the bottom of the page. As a result, notes are buried at the back of the book deterring all but the determined from exploring the sources and connections behind their reading. I am here to defend and revitalize the footnote in its new hypertext guise. The footnote has long served scholars well as a device for augmenting knowledge. Recall Bacon, who was far from bookish or pedantic in his efforts to advance learning, in a line I quoted in chapter 4: “It is no easy matter even to teach what I am proposing, for things new in themselves will still be understood by reference to things already known.” These annotated maps to things already known can guide the public to all that connects social-science research and the larger world.1
