Editor's Forward
"Did the books of antiquity have prefaces?" (AP 852)
EMBARASSINGLY UNDER CONSTRUCTION PLEASE IGNORE
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It seems strange to be doing a literary dissertation in hypertext--to me, that is. It's not that it's strange because it doesn't have its politically relevant stakes, but because literary scholars have always fetishized the book--the book object. When you remove the physicality of the book--its "solid-state" version (*solid state memory in computers is magnetic and magnetism has a longer shelf-life than light)--and here I am using the term the way people like Newton did--a state comprised of knowable textures, dimensions, mechanics. They stay glued together in spite of their wear or they decompose, sure, much in the same way machine readable data does--but their physical qualities are knowable, anchoring the abstract symbols they were designed to contain the physical world of the five senses. Now, half or more of what humans read on webpages is not only invisible--but even if when the source code is made visible with software programs (comprised of even more levels of invisble code and exclusively machine-readable data) few literarians are able to make heads or tails of it. The question is, do literary scholars cut themselves off at the knees with their failure to attend to the subtler goingson in the prodution of literary manuscripts?
Certainly, one doesn't need to understand the art of printing--or the most current printing software for that matter--in order to read a book, but it doesn't ruin a written story to be told precisely how it is made. Songs of Innocence and of Experience (more on this) is all the more appealing as not only as a work of literature but an art object as well, when we discover the painstaking process that went into the creation of the copper plates Blake used in making construction his text. The layering of color and ink on hand painted plates, the watercolor work that went on afterwards, the process reaks of multiplicity. In fact, it's no coincidence that one of the first intersections between computer science and litearture took the form of the William Blake archives at the Unviersity of Virginia.
. . . . So, we can't say this is some sort of innovative approach to comnposition because it has been done before. But, we can address things without taking the source code completely for granted. . . .
But perhaps we can bring to light a few of the simpler underworkings of the creation of hypertext, in a way that will give scholars of literature a bit of a background in the process behind the online liteary texts they are sure to encounter with increasing regularity in the future.
Whenever I go to a literary site, i'm always amazed at the way the medium is overwrought with anachronistic stylistic techniques. The quill--
EMBARASSINGLY UNDER CONSTRUCTION PLEASE IGNORE
Source Code:
It seems strange to be doing a literary dissertation in hypertext--to me, that is. It's not that it's strange because it doesn't have its politically relevant stakes, but because literary scholars have always fetishized the book--the book object. When you remove the physicality of the book--its "solid-state" version (*solid state memory in computers is magnetic and magnetism has a longer shelf-life than light)--and here I am using the term the way people like Newton did--a state comprised of knowable textures, dimensions, mechanics. They stay glued together in spite of their wear or they decompose, sure, much in the same way machine readable data does--but their physical qualities are knowable, anchoring the abstract symbols they were designed to contain the physical world of the five senses. Now, half or more of what humans read on webpages is not only invisible--but even if when the source code is made visible with software programs (comprised of even more levels of invisble code and exclusively machine-readable data) few literarians are able to make heads or tails of it. The question is, do literary scholars cut themselves off at the knees with their failure to attend to the subtler goingson in the prodution of literary manuscripts?
Certainly, one doesn't need to understand the art of printing--or the most current printing software for that matter--in order to read a book, but it doesn't ruin a written story to be told precisely how it is made. Songs of Innocence and of Experience (more on this) is all the more appealing as not only as a work of literature but an art object as well, when we discover the painstaking process that went into the creation of the copper plates Blake used in making construction his text. The layering of color and ink on hand painted plates, the watercolor work that went on afterwards, the process reaks of multiplicity. In fact, it's no coincidence that one of the first intersections between computer science and litearture took the form of the William Blake archives at the Unviersity of Virginia.
. . . . So, we can't say this is some sort of innovative approach to comnposition because it has been done before. But, we can address things without taking the source code completely for granted. . . .
But perhaps we can bring to light a few of the simpler underworkings of the creation of hypertext, in a way that will give scholars of literature a bit of a background in the process behind the online liteary texts they are sure to encounter with increasing regularity in the future.
Whenever I go to a literary site, i'm always amazed at the way the medium is overwrought with anachronistic stylistic techniques. The quill--
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