Electronic Texts
and
Textual Criticism

The "culture" of the Internet, web-page construction and design, traditional editing skills for literary texts, and the creation of scholarly electronic texts for web-based publication are some of the things you will learn about this term.

This course is designed to explore new frontiers that are currently opening in a very old branch of our discipline. Digital technologies and online network delivery have renewed scholarly interest in the editing and annotation of literary texts, the creation of archives devoted to authors' works, and the conservation of rare books and manuscripts. Today's Internet is populated not just by corporations and cranks, but also with sites created by scholars devoted to the widest possible dissemination of once scarce and esoteric materials.

Our term's work will unfold in three phases, not necessarily of equal length. The first will focus on the World Wide Web (WWW) as a means of delivering literary texts and associated material; the second on issues in traditional scholarly editing and new paradigms called forth by the electronic medium; and the third on complex encoding schemes for the creation of electronic texts. Topics addressed in the first phase will include the rhetoric of hypertext, criteria for the critical evaluation of online materials, and website design and management. In the second phase we will concentrate on traditional editorial skills such as the identification of variant texts and techniques for comparing them, the determination of "copytext" and degrees of "normalization", and the emergence of version theory in contemporary scholarly editing. Finally, a comparison of different markup schemes such as HTML and SGML (TEI) will lead to the application of what has been learned to a small editorial project.

Your work in this class will be evaluated on the basis of class participation, class presentations, and the successful completion of three projects, the first a web-based hypertext, the second a letter edited from a manuscript source, and the third an edited electronic text.