Well crew, we’ve been annotating on Genius for over a month now. We’ve progressed steadily, and you’re continually producing good work. We’ll do even more moving forward.

Now is a good time for me to tell you about one of the legendary annotators on the site. In some quarters, people even refer to him as the Michael Jordan of Poetry Genius. You might as well say he performs like Mike—any one: Tyson, Jordan, Jackson.

A couple of years ago while in New York City, I stopped by the offices of Genius Media in Brooklyn. I was talking to the company’s education chief Jeremy Dean, and we were looking at annotations on the site that were displayed on a screen. Someone mentioned a change that needed to be made, and I noticed this guy walk over to a computer and make the change.

When I realized what his username was, I froze.

I was face-to-face with the one and only Perfectrhyme.

Back when I had less than 2,000 IQ points, I noticed those annotators with over 30,000 points on Poetry Genius. Now, it wasn’t hard to believe that someone could rack up so many IQ points on rap. But over 30,000 IQ points on poetry?

I didn’t believe that the username Perfectrhyme belonged to an individual person. I assumed it was a group of people, some collective of annotators, sharing an account, or perhaps it was one of those BOTs that was programmed to perform online tasks automatically. Or maybe Perfectrhyme was Skynet. But a person? Nah, couldn’t be.

“Hold up,” I asked the guy. “You’re Perfectrhyme?!? Like, the Perfectrhyme?”

He shyly admitted it.

My fanboy, star-struck antics aside, I was pleased to meet one of the annotators in person whose work I admired. Over the last couple of years, I’ve kept an eye on Perfectrhyme’s Genius activities and tried to emulate his work. I’d encourage you to check some of his annotations out as you improve your own.

Lit Genius’s top 10 annotators

Perfectrhyme is one among a group of all-time top Lit. Genius annotators. If you take a look at the accounts of those top 10, you’ll be inclined to consider the value of specializing on a subject or artist. Notice that kukukadoo is the leading person on John Milton with over 10,000 IQ points on that figure alone. Stephen Pringle is a leader on Ezra Pound and Geoffrey Chaucer among others. Check out jeeho on Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Mary Shelley. And you’ve got areacode313 on Shakespeare as well.

And there’s more. Consider Mr. Allen, a high school teacher, who’s among the leaders on Lit Genius. Check out Greg Givens, and you’ll get a sense of his Biblical knowledge. And then Dalmo. Listen: I’m aware that some of you know a lot about Nicki Minaj. Cool. But we have public evidence that Dalmo knows more, much more, than you and all of us. .

Elizabeth Milch and Jeremy Dean, the education specialists for Genius, are also in the top 10 and are definitely worth checking out.

Taken together, those annotators cover a wide range of materials on the site, but they appear to have at least one specialty or a subject where they stand out as leaders.

Annotators, Editors, Diaspora, and Community

I’ve been referring to those folks as annotators, and they are. But if you take an even closer look at their activities on the site, you’ll see that one major way that they’ve attained such high IQ levels is based on all the editorial work that they do on the site. They check annotations for accuracy; they run fact checks; they adjust for phrasing; they offer corrections to students and various users on the site. They do that over and over and over again.

So based on their daily activities over time on Genius, we would do well to refer to them editors, not only annotators. It’s their tireless editorial work that allows them to keep building their IQs.

In class, we’ve been talking some about diaspora and community, so I wondered what some of those concepts might mean in the context of a group of editors. I thought about how editors and curators can assist in holding a community together and linking a wide-ranging disparate group of people and ideas.

In a given week, Dalmo might assume editorial duties on our guy Paul Laurence Dunbar and our homegirl Nicki Minaj. And the cool thing is that you can track his efforts as he’s doing so. And then Perfectrhyme will swoop in on Of Mice and Men move to T.S. Eliot and then go over to The Souls of Black Folk in one day. But that’s nothing when you recall what Perfectrhyme did in that Game 6.

I’ve decided to shout these leading Lit. Genius folks out just so you’ll have a few excellent models on how to sharpen your own skills on this site, and more importantly beyond.