>What do you think of the world that Lavagnino wants to `help the neophytes` to
>see? How does literature change with the presentation of a more seamless (for
>a definition of Seamless see Ulmer`s `Grammatology Hypermedia` of a few weeks
>back) interaction with the entirety of a text, a complete compendium of its
>versions, and analytical tools based upon it? (including links to related
>texts at the fringes of the cluster.
>
>Perhaps address the issue of how hypertext can keep elements of this kind of
>presentation more separate and yet integrate them more directly
>or `transparently.`
>
I had a good example of this recently: during the first part of our midterm
exam period, I was part of a Ph.D. defense for a dissertation in descriptive
bibliography that involved examining in detail the variants in 15,000 pages
of Ben Jonson, as printed by a contemporary printer (Jonson's contemporary)
named Wm. Stansby. Parts of this diss. were difficult to follow, because
they presented (in tabular columns) data gathered from this examination--and
yet there was on top of this data (so to speak) an interesting narrative of
the printer's practice that was quite readable for the interested amateur.
A hypertextual presentation could have offered a nice solution to this
problem, by presenting the primary data in the form of a queryable database
alongside the narrative, so that anyone interested in that level of detail
could examine the primary data, and anyone not that interested in detail
could have unobstructed access to the critical/historical narrative.
John Unsworth / Director, IATH / Dept. of English
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http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/