A digital text, not being confined to the dimensions of page and book, can offer both options at once: the look of a clean, text-only page with quick access to a virtual library of reliable scholarship.
The text can appear initially unannotated because links to annotations appear only when you drag a cursor across them, or only when you select a certain menu option--say, all word-glosses to be marked.
Then the reader can consult glosses selectively. Hypertext digital archives eliminate the shotgun effect of googling, can incorporate links to other sites as well as internal links to a potentially endless array of resources, and can continue to be extended and reconstructed by successive generations of editors. They can incorporate features that enable them to support high-end scholarly research while leaving them user-friendly enough for high school students or anyone with access to the net.
My guess would be that this is the form in which the work of our most distinguished editors will live on. Someday their glosses, articles from the Spenser encyclopedia, and who knows what else, will be incorporated into a digital archive and variouslly linked to the text.
The editors of the Oxford edition currently in preparation are trying to build the first version of such an archive. We figure it may take a while . . .
>>> [log in to unmask] 04/15 4:56 AM >>>
I certainly didn't mean to suggest that we should *abandon* glosses; I am
simply wondering how the practice of annotating might, or should, change
in an age where access to information is readier (if still slightly
unreliable, as many note) than ever. I can almost imagine, now, an extreme
case where an editor simply flags ('anchors') words that the student
should, or might like to, chase up; but of course I wouldn't want to do
without the kinds of annotation that not only explain, but connect.
I declare my need for and indebtedness to heavily-annotated editions like
Variorum, Hamilton, Fowler, etc. But of course these editions also
*restrict* our readings, and *direct* them. In the pluralistic
interpretative world of the Googlian age, is it not time to experiment
again not only with the 'unedited' text, but the 'unannotated' text? I
don't mean to suggest a new practical criticism, but rather, as David
Miller reminded me recently, to restore the thrill and pleasure of the
reader's own itinerary of discovery. Annotated editions can be
*deflating*, where the experience of *growing* to love a poet like Spenser
or Milton should be, I'd have thought, *invigorating*. My students often
feel overwhelmed by Spenser, which I think is partly a response to the
*edition* in which they encounter him, rather than to the poems
themselves; they are never given the opportunity to latch onto and love
the poetry for its successively-revealing simplicities, before being
whelmed and clobbered with its complexity, allusiveness, philosophical
depth, and so on.
A 'plain text' edition should not be taken as a licence for indolence, but
rather an invitation to discovery. Are we forestalling discovery?
Just wondering. One a penny, two a penny.
az
Andrew Zurcher
Tutor and Director of Studies in English
Queens' College
Cambridge CB3 9ET
United Kingdom
+44 1223 335 572
hast hast post hast for lyfe
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