Untitled - witz cultural

'r05HYPERTEXT 3.0 of, say, Vedas or Vishnu, in that lexia was then linked to the longer essays,thereby providing conveniently accessible information on demand but notbefore it was required.I have approached these questions about scholarly editions through theapparently unrelated matters of a student assignment and educational materialsbecause they remind us that in anything like a fully linked electronicenvironment, all texts have variable applications and purposes. One consequenceappears in the variable forms that annotation and editorial apparatuswill almost certainly have to take: since everyone from the advanced scholardown to the beginning student or reader outside the setting ofan educationalinstitution might be able to read such texts, they will require various layers orlevels of annotation, something particularly necessary when the ultimatelinked text is not a scholarly note but another literary text.Thus far I have written only as if the linked material in the hypertextscholarly edition consists of textual apparatus, explanatory comment, andcontextualization, but by now it should have become obvious that many ofthose comments inevitably lead to other so-called primary texts. Thus, in ourputative edition of "Hudson's Statue" one cannot only link it to referenceworks, such as the OED,Ihe Britannica, (and possibly in the future) to theDictionary of National Biography, but also to entire linguistic corpora and toother texts by the same author, including working drafts, letters, and otherpublications. Why stop therel Even in the relatively flat, primitive version ofhypertext offered by the present World Wide Web of the Carlylean textdemands links to works on which he draws, such as fonathan Swift's Tale ofa Tub, and those that draw on him, such as Ruskin's "Trafficl'whose satiricimage of the Goddess-oiGetting-on (or Britannia of the Market) derivesrather obviously from Carlyle's ruminations on the never-completed statue ofa stock swindler. Finally, one cannot restrict the text field to literary works,and "Hudson's Statue" inevitably links not only to the Bible and contemporaryguides to its interpretation but also to a wide range of primary materials,including parliamentary documents and contemporary newspapers, towhich Carlyle's text obviously relates.Once again, though, Iinking, which reconfigures our experience andexpectations of the text, is not enough, for the scholarly editor must decidehow Io link various texts. The need for some form of intermediary lexiasagain seems obvious, the first, say, briefly pointing to a proposed connectionbetween two texts, the next in sequence providing a summary of complexrelations (the outline, in fact, of what might in the print environment havebeen a scholarly article or even book), the third an overview of relevant com-