Untitled - witz cultural

't04HYPERTEXT 3.0 be an existing edition. In fact, one can envisage a situation in which readersmight ultimately encounter a range of annotations.An example taken from my recent experience with having students createan annotated version-read "edition"-ofCarlyle's "Hudson's Statue" onthe World Wide Web illuminates some of the issues here. I intended the assignmentin part to introduce undergraduates to various electronic resourcesavailable at my university, including the online versions of the Oxford EnglishDictionary and Encyclopoedia Britannica.l wished to habituate them to usingelectronic reference tools accessible outside the physical precincts ofthelibrary both to acquaint them with these new tools and also to encourage studentsto move from them to those presently available only in print form. Forthis project students chose terms or phrases ranging from British politicalhistory ("Lord Ellenborough" and "People's League") to religion and mlth("Vishnu,""Vedas,""Loki"). They then defined or described the items chosenand then briefly explained Carlyle's allusion and, where known, his uses ofthese items in other writings.This simple undergraduate assignment immediately raised issues crucialto the electronic scholarly edition. First of all, the absence of limitationson scale-or to be more accurate, the absence of the same limitations onscale one encounters with physical editions-permits much longer, moresubstantial notes than might seem suitable in a print edition. To some ertenta hypertext environment always reconfigures the relative status of main textand subsidiary annotation. It also makes much longer notes possible. Electroniclinking makes information in a note easily available, and thereforethese more substantial notes conveniently link to many more places bothinside and outside the particular text under consideration than would beeither possible or conveniently usable in a print edition. Taking our presentexample of "Hudson's Statue," for instance, we see that historical materialson, say, democratic movements like Chartism and the People's InternationalLeague, can shift positions in relation to the annotated text unlike a printenvironment, an electronic one permits perceiving the relation of suchmaterials in opposite manners. The historical materials can appear as annotationsto the Carlyle text, or conversely "Hudson's Statue" can appear-beexperienced as-an annotation to the historical materials. Both in otherwords exist in a networked textual field in which their relationship dependssolely on the reader's need and purpose.Such recognitions of what happens to the scholarly text in wide-areanetworkedenvironments, such as those created bv World Wide Web and