The Rationale of Hypertext

An Electronic Edition of Eighteenth-Century Drama: The Materiality of Editing in Performance

“…The electronic environment of hyperediting overcomes the codex-based limits, according to McGann (1997), as computerization can optimize the logical categories of traditional critical editing that can then acquire new functions. In fact, to function in a "hyper" mode, an editing project must use computerization in such a way as to get over the analytic limits of hardcopy text.…”

“…He further recognizes the relevance of hyperediting projects, since hypermedia editions offer the possibility of incorporating audio and/or visual elements that capture the multimedia nature of literary works: "texts are language visible, auditional, and intellectual (gesture and (type)script, voice and instrumentation, syntax and usage)" (33). McGann (1997) also introduces a distinction between archive and edition. Curiously enough, the author explicitly links the term edition to a book format, with its specific categories of production and dissemination, while emphasizing the unlimited expansion potential of both the contents and web of relations of a hypermedia archive.…”

“…The electronic edition is thus seen as the optimized medium for the promotion of the scholarly reading edition, fitting in as a compromise between the scholarly requirements and the cultural demands of the present. Nevertheless, and despite well-intentioned attempts to customize the scholarly edition, McGann (1997) points out that But for the scientist and scholar, the media of expression are primarily conceptual utilities, means rather than ends. Scholars often seek to evade or supercede an expressive form to the extent that it hinders the conceptual goal (whether it be theoretical or practical) (20) This brief theoretical overview shows that despite the many possibilities prompted by the digital an equal number of challenges still lie ahead, particularly in what concerns the craft of editing.…”

Past, present and future of historical information science

“…McGann's ideas about 'social editing' and 'hyperediting' emphasise the value of hypertext and hypermedia in relation to the social aspects of literary texts (McGann, 1991(McGann, , 1992(McGann, , 1995(McGann, , 2002. Landow argued that "the dispersed text of hypertext has much in common with the way contemp orary, individual readers of, say, Chaucer or Dante, read texts that differed from one another in various ways" (Landow, 1996?).…”

On synthetic technologies: the book, the university, the Internet

“…'From a literary person's point of view, however, the relevance of these changes can appear to be purely marginal: for whatever happens in the future, whatever new electronic poetry or fiction gets produced, the literature we inherit (to this date) is and will always be bookish.' 8 It should not be surprising, therefore, that the book figures so prominently as an iconic element of university and college seals and emblems (and -if you look closely -of the logo of the ACLS as well). Its deep embedment in the mission of higher learning goes back to the first medieval universities, which witnessed a shift from a monastic model of writing as preservation and memory, largely dissociated from reading, to a scholastic model 'which made the book both the object and the instrument of intellectual labour', 9 silently and selectively read.…”