At 8:02 AM -0400 4/15/06, David L. Miller wrote:
>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.
Right, and the dichotomy put forth earlier in this thread between
reliable print annotation and unreliable electronic sources is a
false one. The reliability is independent of the medium. Doubting
the reliability of the Internet is like doubting the reliability of
"the publishing industry." When I scanned the remainder table at a
local bookstore recently, skipping over the weight loss programs and
political hack memoirs but snapping up a copy of Machiavelli's
Discourses for five bucks, I don't see that what I was doing was
different in kind from sorting through a page of Google search
results. I did have to know something about what I was looking for
before the search could do me any good. There may be some
differences in the details of how we recognize authority in different
media, but the basic procedure is the same.
If we want reliable annotations attached to reliable texts, we have
to put them there, whether "there" refers to a print page and its
supplementary materials or to a digital page and its supplementary
materials. As David explains so well below, the distinguishing
characteristic of digitally-presented scholarly texts is the
flexibility they provide in selectively showing or hiding the
apparatus.
>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 . . .
WordHoard does this now for certain types of linguistic information.
It does not have a gloss for Spenser (though it does for Chaucer),
and the only annotations on the near horizon are E.K.'s. But as Martin
has said, we have a pretty good idea of what it takes to capture
annotation, link it to the text, and display or hide it at the
reader's whim. It will be fun to compare notes in Toronto and see
what we can learn from each other.
--
________________________________________
Craig A. Berry
mailto:[log in to unmask]
"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
difficult than getting in."
Brad Leithauser
|