
Anthony Grafton Defends the Footnote (1997) - benbreen
https://paw.princeton.edu/article/anthony-grafton-defends-footnote
======
keiferski
Years ago, I read _Infinite Jest_ , which famously has hundreds of footnotes,
so many that the entire last fourth of the book is composed of them. At that
time, it seemed innovative and academic in a really intellectual, mind-
expanding way, a bit like how inline Wikipedia links probably felt in 2003.

I recently started re-reading the book and had the exact opposite reaction. It
seemed excessive, bloated, and generally just overdone. I'm left wishing that
DFW had incorporated the footnotes into the writing itself and was just more
succinct in general.

It led me to think that this is probably a subconscious reaction to the
"excess of information" age we find ourselves in. This link and _Infinite
Jest_ were both written in a pre-Internet age.

~~~
dmux
I believe Infinite Jest uses "endnotes" as opposed to footnotes. One
interesting example of footnotes is Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves
where different narrators make extensive use of footnotes to add additional
details to the story. On many occasions, the "base" story is only a single
paragraph and the footnotes will run on for dozens of pages.

~~~
Tomte
Also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mezzanine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mezzanine)

I gave up after the first quarter or so. Never got into any reading flow.

------
tenkabuto
Regarding the use of footnotes in non-fixed media, such as webpages and ePub
(ebooks), I feel that the distinction between footnotes and endnotes is
somewhat irrelevant because they are hidden at the end of the relevant
article/chapter. However, with ebooks the notion of endnotes makes more sense
to me, as the notes would be pushed to the back of the book instead of the
back of the relevant chapter.

~~~
JadeNB
Does anything about ePub prevent renderers from putting footnotes at the
bottom of the physical page to which they logically belong? I find navigating
them by touch in their usual placement so cumbersome (requiring tapping on
tiny targets, which is usually registered as a page flip since it's in a
margin) that I wonder why no alternatives have been explored.

