Tom's reply raises an interesting point (which I have been worrying about
while annotating Spenser lately): is it worth putting in a footnote
something a reader can find easily on Google? or in the OED (now
electrified)? or in the DNB (now electrified)? etc? Soon we will be
reading these texts online, or at least many of our students and readers
will; if they can, with the click of a link, put the OED entry for
'obviated' in a side frame, do I need to gloss it? If they can turn up
information on the Thames estuary, via Google, in a new browser window, am
I just wasting my time providing this 'information'? One could imagine
that the gloss/annotation, in this information-rich age, need only provide
information of a kind that it is not readily accessible to the browser
(collapse of subject and instrument intended there) -- what I might call
second-order information. Thus it will always be important to alert
readers to a source in, say, Lucretius, or to a series of articles written
on satyrs in the 1930s; but it might not be helpful to belabor
'information' that the browser can find easily for herself. (Here I am
obviously not discussing the kind of interpretative work the editor might
do, or might prompt, by an annotation that is more than merely
informative. I am also distinguishing between what a reader *can* find
easily, because it is obvious that it *should* easily be found; and what
a reader *could* find easily if she knew that she should be looking for
it, which might might itself not be obvious.)
Of course on the other side it might be argued that 'space' has become so
cheap in the new electronic archive that an editor should include as much
information as possible -- reduplication and copia do not bear the same
economic weight these days as they used to. Simplifying the browser's task
in assimilating the appropriate information may make her enjoyment of,
say, Spenser the greater. Or will it forestall and pervert it?
My students are already turning in essays that make creative, and
sometimes gratifyingly scholarly, use of Google searches. They are not
ignoring the annotations in their texts, but they are certainly
complementing and sometimes superseding them (which is, if course, to be
desired). Will this balance continue to shift? Should our annotations
become 'links'? Or, more properly, ought we to think of our annotations as
creating 'anchors' for connective, reader-driven research? Nodes? It's
exciting to think that we might, soon, produce a text that the reader
could mold, in the most plastic way, to her own desired level of
annotation -- ranging from no editorial interference, 'raised' anchors on
particular words, and slight annotation, to copious documentation or even
full commentary.
andrew
> sorry that my annotations did not help. I remember talking to old
> Professor Osgood who did that old article on Spenser's English Rivers.
> I am away from my library, but I think I can solve your problems by
> urging you to go Google and search "Medway and Swale Esturary" and
> "River Medway." You will get more than a footnote worth of information.
> Good luck on your deadline. Tpr ----- Original Message ----- From:
> Dorothy Stephens <[log in to unmask]> Date: Thursday, April 13, 2006 8:36
> am Subject: Re: Medway-Themes To: [log in to unmask]
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