Untitled - witz cultural

181RECONFIGURINCWRITINCbeen nagging at me for a decade, I decided to carry out an experiment, testingmy proposition that hypermedia provides literary scholars with the equivalentof a scientific laboratory. Therefore, as some of my own books on Victorianart, literature, and religion have gone out ofprint, I retrieved copyrightfrom my publishers, translated them into HTML, and placed them on TheVictoian Web; since the appearance of Hypertert 2.0 more than a dozenscholars have contributed one or more of their works to this enterprise. As Idid so, I began to take advantage ofcharacteristics ofhypertext that justifytranslating a book into a web, the most basic of which is the synergy thatderives from linking materials together. Reasons of economy and scale hadprevented including illustrations of the many paintings mentioned in theoriginal print version of my edition of the letters of fohn Ruskin and the Victorianartist, W. Holman Hunt, but once I had created web versions of thiscorrespondence, my book on that artist, and articles from Art Bulletin andother iournals, I found that these texts all worked together better than theyhad alone. A footnote providing the source of a letter could now, for example,lead to the text of the letter itself. Even more important, if an illustration wasavailable anywhere in the text, itbecame available everywhere. Texts needingillustrations particularly benefit from electronic presentation, since a digitalimage, which is a matter of codes rather than physical marks on physical surfaces,multiplies while taking up no additional space. Using an image fiftytimes within one text or set of texts requires no more storage space or otherresources than does using it once. Digitization thus permits the reuse of theimage at several fixed places in a text; hypertexfualization permits the imageto be called up from numerous points as the reader finds its presence of use.In World Wide Web viewers, which temporarily store images downloadedfrom a network in a cache, reusing the same image takes much less time thanit did obtaining it in the first place.A final reason for translating a book into an electronic environmentinvolves adding capacities not possible in print. Hypermedia translations ofprint texts in mathematics, sciences, music, history and the arts have alreadyappeared, employing sound, animation, video, and simulation environments.Let us look at some instances ofthese when proposing some general rules foremploying sound and motion within alphanumeric text.Assuming that you have a text that demands hypertextualization, howshould you go about carrying it out? Since I have thus far converted severaldozen books into various hypermedia systems, I believe the best way toanswer that question would be to summarize my experience and use it to