Untitled - witz cultural

't03RECONFIGURINGTHE TEXTrearranged their texts throughout their careers, one recognizes that the traditionalscholarly edition generally makes extremely difficult reconstructingthe version someone read at a particular date. Indeed, from one point ofviewit may radically distort our experience of an individual volume of poems bythe very fact that it enforces an especially static frozen model on what tumsout to have been a continually shifting and changing entity.This new conception of a more fluid, dispersed text, possibly truer thanconventional editions, raises the issire ifone can have a scholarly edition atall, or if we must settle for what McGann terms an archive ("Complete Writings")-essentiallya collection oftexh;al fragments (or versions) from whichwe assemble, or have the computer assemble, any particular version that suitsa certain reading strategy or scholarly question, such as "What version ofMod.em Painters, Volume 1, did William Morris read at a particular date andhow did the text he read differ from what American Ruskinians read)"One does not encounter many of these issues when producing print editions because matters of scale and economy decide or foreclose them inadvance. In general, physical and economic limitations shape the nature ofannotations one attaches to a print edition just as they shape the basic conceptionof that edition. So what can we expect to happen when these limitationsdisappearl Or, to phrase the question differently, what advantages anddisadvantages, what new problems and new advantages, will we encounterwith the digital wordlHypertext, ScholarlyAnnotation, and theElectronic Scholarly EditionOne answer lies in what hypertext does to the concept ofannotation. As I argue at length in the following chapter, thisnew information technology reconfigures not only our experienceof textuality but also our conceptions of the author'srelation to that text, for it inevitably produces several formsof asynchronous collaboration, the first, limited one inevitablyappearing when readers choose their own ways through a branching text. Asecond form appears only in a fully networked hypertext environment thatpermits readers to add links to texts they encounter. In such environments,which are exemplified by the World Wide Web, the editor, like the author,inevitably loses a certain amount of power and control. Or, as one of myfriends who created the first website for a major computer company pointedout, "If you want to play this game, you have to give up control of your owntext." Although one could envision a situation in which any reader could commenton another editor's text, a far more interesting one arises when successiveeditors or commentators add to what in the print environment would