on meaning making - marks on articles

The following paragraph is an excerpt from my previous blog entry (Actor-Network Theory and Managing Knowledge), triggered for repetition after I read James Robertson's Making meaning who refers to Denham Grey's share meaning.

The excerpt:

Next, I would like to demonstrate the naming and the power of the semantic tool with two examples reflecting from my personal experience upon embarking on the Ph.D. program. First, I would like to describe the performative power of the marks I inscribe on the pages of articles and books I read for my classes. Usually, at the start of a new article, more so if the article presents concepts that I perceive unfamiliar, my red pen inscribes all sorts of marks (stars, checks, circles, question marks, exclamation marks, underlining, etc.) with their intended and perceived importance. The first run through the article produces a set of marks placed mostly in the sidelines of article’s pages, each of them with their perceived meaning of what I think is important and necessary for me to master the ideas presented therein, or because I believe that a particular quote will be useful later on. At times I wonder if I’m overdoing with these marks as the more I inscribe they tend to loose their relative significance. The topology of the marks on the pages would have been much different (in relations to each other as well as their quantity) had I had some prior understanding about marks’ meanings. Nevertheless, the point I’m stressing is that the marks tell me different things the next time I look at them for just making sure I have understood a concept or for review purposes. Sometimes I even wonder why have I underlined a certain sentence. At other times I discover that I have missed a certain concept. However, the result is that these entities have performed on my knowledge structure and have also been performed upon themselves, as some of them do not carry the same meaning I attached to them at the time of inscription. The topology in this case would be the article with its marks and also my knowledge structure. However, the article is also part of other topologies, such as the set of articles written by the same author, the set of articles contained in the journal it was published, the disciplines or studies it was intended to perform upon, etc. In my case the marks have performed mostly vertically (affecting my knowledge structure). They probably would not mean much to anyone else, unless I write a page of rules and guidelines describing the marks together with their intentions as I perceived them. But this would be a very hard task because they might not be of much benefit to others given the personal performative nature. (Full article)