The Medieval Origins of the Modern Footnote

Great article you posted, lots to think about. I can really see online footnoting being a great approach for university textbooks (which are often already long), particularly because undergrads seem less likely to be engaging thoroughly with the notes anyway. For monographs, where more readers are more likely to be reading the notes along with the rest of the text, I'm less sure about moving to online. Definitely a conversation worth having! Thanks for sharing the article.

A centralized URL is likely to go offline long before all decentralized physical copies of a book.

A scholarly article without footnotes is like source code without git/mercurial history. Like the long tail in search, it's not about frequency of access, but the force of accountability that footnotes exert upon the main text.