This online annotation event, which took place asynchronously from Monday, November 16 to Friday, November 20, was an opportunity for our community of scholars to engage differently and collectively with a text whose significance for our Americas has been long-standing, transregional, and profound. Over the course of five days, we invited folks to use the digital editing tool hypothes.is to help enrich a new digital edition of the French original by Kora Verón and original translation by Kaiama L. Glover and Alex Gil of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land–a version that, through a process of generative layering, now amounts to a rich multimedia paratext to Césaire’s extraordinary text. The week began with a 45-minute tool-acquisition tutorial, after which the proverbial floor was opened. In 2019 archipelagos journal hosted a similar event as an exercise in digital peer review, around Laurent Dubois, David Kirkland Garner, and Mary Caton Lingold’s website Musical Passage. A full account of that marvelous experiment can be found in archipelagos (4).

While the official event has closed, the site remains public and open for further engagement. Should you decide to join the conversation with our community, please consider signing up here, so we have a record of your participation. And if you are new to hypothes.is, you can learn more about it and create an account on their website.