Shaking Hands with
the Devil: In Praise of Hypertext
Brian Ballentine
ENGL 500
Dec. 4, 1998
"[W]e no longer have to use books to analyze and study
other books or texts. That simple fact carries immense, even
catastrophic, significance" (McGann 20).
The last several years have seen an extensive growth in Internet
sites devoted to the study of literature. "ll periods of
the field from Medieval, to Modern, to contemporary work have
found homes on the World Wide Web. In the case of many budding
poets, fiction writers and critical analysts, the web is the
only place their work exists. The progress of computer
technology and the web present a new fertile means of information
dissemination. High resolution graphics, audio and video files
are all elements which are being incorporated into scholarly
web sites. If a Renaissance scholar wanted to hear and see a
Shakespearean trained actor deliver one of Hamlet's famous soliloquies,
they could do so by searching on the web. Conversely, other scholars
are asking "Is this what we want? Do we know what we are
doing?" (Birkerts 211). The idea that the computer age is
synonymous for "quite simply living through the last days
of the book" is a concern that is getting a good deal of
press, both literally in print and on the web (Genette 22). Many
of today's scholars who are leery of hypertext and the presence
of the World Wide Web, fear not only for the life of the book
but for the quality of scholarship. In his, The Gutenberg
Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic "ge, Sven
Birkerts expresses his fear over the welcoming that has been
extended to the web: "Do people understand that there might
be consequences, possibly dire, to our embrace of these technologies,
and that the myth of the Faustian bargain has not become irrelevant
just because we studied it in school?" (211). It is doubtful
that Birkerts' concerns are being addressed on many levels outside
academia. Even there, the numbers are few as the rest hold open
the door and extend a friendly hand for the would be devil. The
resources of the web are being explored by both scholars and
teachers alike and these people are becoming educated as to how
to capitalize on the web's capabilities. This paper is going
to analyze a literature based, scholarly web site and its book
equivalent as a means of discussing the value of the web as a
research and heuristic device.
An excellent opportunity to witness the heuristic capabilities
of the web presents itself in recent scholarship surrounding
the poet/artist William Blake. In the late 1980s, the William
Blake Trust began the laborious project of producing facsimile/critical
editions of all Blake's engraved books, otherwise known as his
"Illuminated Books." Difficult editorial decisions
faced the project team. For example, the fifth volume of this
project is Blake's Milton a Poem. Blake produced four
known copies of this work which have been labeled A, B, C and
D. Unfortunately, in these four copies Blake put his plates in
three different sequences. Since the numbers were engraved to
be part of the page, Blake often amended the pagination with
the use of asterisks, i.e. page "8" is followed by
page "8*." He also numbered both the title page and
the first page of text as "1." The confusion only builds
when one stops to consider the other editorial decisions that
have been made in other publications of this work. The editors
decided to reproduce copy "C" stored in the New York
Public Library. Two pages that are included by Blake in the other
editions were omitted by him in this copy. These pages are reproduced
in a separate section of the book containing supplementary illustrations.
"ll copies of the plates from edition "C" are
reproduced in actual size. These volumes compiled by the Blake
Trust have extensive commentary on Blake and his work. Preceding
the plates themselves are short commentaries on the action occurring
within the plates and the characters involved. Following the
plates is a typed text version of Blake's poem, complete with
extensive footnotes. The small, often illegible words from the
plates needed to be reproduced in plain text form for accessibility.
Blake's use of obscure historical and biblical figures needed
to be footnoted also for the sake of accessing the work. Finally,
it was decided that the books themselves would be made of high
quality materials. The hardback volumes are a large 8.5 by 12
inches, printed on a heavy grade paper and carry a suggested
retail price of eighty-five dollars each (Essick and Viscomi).
The editors of this volume, Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi,
have every right to be pleased with the outcome of their labors.
They have produced a superb and unparalleled reproduction of
Blake's Milton. They made seemingly wise inclusions and
the book is formatted in such a way that a reader can move from
original plate, to a plain text copy, to a plate commentary,
to footnotes, and to bibliographic information with limited difficulty.
"ll of these services are needed in reading Blake and once
one goes through the process a few times, navigating the book
is relatively simple.
Scholarly editions such as Milton have long been the essential
instruments of literary studies. However, this tradition of using
books to study other books is being questioned and by some critics
it has been deemed insufficient:
This symmetry between the tool and its subject forces the scholar
to invent analytic mechanisms that must be displayed and engaged
at the primary reading level - e.g. apparatus structures, descriptive
bibliographies, calculi of variants, shorthand reference forms,
and so forth. The critical edition's apparatus, for example,
exists only because no single book or manageable set of books
can incorporate for analysis all of the relevant documents (McGann
21).
In this specific case of Milton, how does the scholar
get to study the other three versions housed in London, Washington,
D.C. and California? What if from reading the footnotes a scholar
discovers that while Blake was working on Milton he was
also involved in producing commercial work that has never been
reproduced anywhere? Is it feasible for a reader, or a library
for that matter, to obtain all of the volumes of this project
for what would be an already limited comparative analysis? Is
there a need to create a better method of gathering information
about Blake and his work? For Essick and Viscomi, the answer
is quite clearly "yes."
With support from the Institute for "dvanced Technology
in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, Essick, Viscomi
and another editor, Morris Eaves, have orchestrated the William
Blake Archive on the world wide web. "t the core of this
endeavor are high resolution scanned images from the 19 illustrated
books that Blake produced. This will be the first time that over
half of these illuminated books have ever been reproduced. When
it is complete, the archive will contain close to3000 images,
approximately 2/3 from the illuminated books and the rest will
be from other engravings as well as paintings and drawings. (Blake
Archive). By comparison, the printed Milton volume was
able to contain 72 images by Blake. The editors of the archive
are insistent that their web site is providing a new means of
analysis "that only hypermedia will allow" (Blake Archive).
As with any new tool, its user is faced with the task of learning
how to manipulate it properly. The same holds true for the newcomer
to the world wide web. The Blake Archive has been quite generous
with its provisions of navigational instructions. The main page
of the site, which serves more or less as a table of contents,
provides a "How to Use the William Blake Archive" link.
The overly fastidious instructions are difficult to read off
the screen. The fifteen pages of directions are understood best
after they have been downloaded to a printer.
Nevertheless, the directions accurately lead web users to the
"Works "vailable" link and consequently to the
portion that is Milton a Poem. "ll of the individual
plates are listed and can be selected for full size viewing.
The plates appear on screen with a quality and accuracy that
matches that of the print volume of Milton. "t this
stage, the researcher has the option of linking to various portions
of the archive. Since Blake's plates are difficult to read in
their natural form, a typed text version of the plate may be
called up by selecting the "Transcription" link. The
editors had the foresight to instruct the programmers for the
archive to create a separate page or window when this selection
is made. Consequently, both the original plate by Blake and the
text version of his work can be compared side by side. The Blake
Archive also has a "zoom" function that allows a viewer
to magnify the plate on screen. By doing so, some of Blake's
less noticeable and marginal figures come into view for a better
analysis. The editors have successfully provided "a near-first-hand
experience of manuscripts formerly only available to the few"
(Unsworth).
Perhaps the most advanced feature of the Blake Archive is the
ability to search for a specific item(s) found in Blake's text
or his images. For example, a student having read Milton
recalls that the first plate of text contains what is known as
the "Bard's Song." The student is interested in discovering
where else in Blake's works bards appear in order to pursue a
possible research paper topic. After "clicking on"
the "Search the Blake Archive" link, the student opts
for a text search. "fter entering "bard" as his/her
selection, the student is presented with a list of the word's
occurrence in Blake's work: Seven in Milton, four in America:
" Prophecy and two in Songs of Innocence and Experience.
Each of these listed occurrences are live links to the pages
on which the word "Bard" is found. The same procedure
occurs when one chooses to search for bards via the image search.
" listing is presented to the web user of all the locations
that Blake may have depicted bards in his illustrations. "
simple "click" on the link provides the user with electronic
representations of Blake's bard images.
While a conventional library search of print versions could eventually
yield similar if not the same results, it presents other difficulties.
Books are equipped with indexes to provide researchers quick
information regarding the contents. Of course, this is contingent
on the necessary books being available in libraries. Even in
the most voluminous facilities there is no guarantee that the
sought after resource will be on the shelf. Systems such as inter-library
loan that make the resources of other libraries accessible have
become more efficient. However, it is not uncommon to wait a
week or more before receiving requested material.
Within the Case Western Reserve library system alone there are
over one hundred books on William Blake. " thorough examination
of even a majority of these texts for say, a research paper,
is a simple impossibility. Researchers rely heavily on indexes
when dealing with larger amounts of material. Continuing with
the search on Blake's bard, most of the indexes have citations
pointing towards the illustrations Blake did of Thomas Gray's
work The Bard. While it would be important to examine
these illustrations this search is incomplete. Even searching
works that specifically tackle Milton can be frustrating
when they are equipped with poor indexing. Susan Fox's Poetic
Form in Blake's Milton is such a case. The "bard's
song" is frequently discussed as making up the structure
or the "form" of the beginning of Blake's poem and
there is no reference to "bards" in this book's index.
Threshing out the worthwhile readings brings researchers back
mostly to early Blake scholars such as S. Foster Damon, Geoffrey
Keynes, Northrop Frye and a few others. Perhaps one of the largest
break-through works on Blake is Damon's concordance "
Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake.
Originally published in 1965, this is arguably the most thorough
and comprehensive work on Blake. However, even a compendium such
as this has its short-comings. Ironically, it was one of the
editors of the Blake Archive, Morris Eaves, who in 1988 completed
the project of creating a new foreword, an annotated bibliography
and an index to Damon's dictionary. In the "Preface to the
Index," Eaves explains his rationale for this project:
Damon tried to make the Dictionary an encyclopedia, but
he was not compulsive about it, and he did not resist the urge
to put things where he felt like putting them, a characteristic
that makes the Dictionary as a study of Blake more interesting,
the Dictionary as a dictionary less accessible. Damon
interpolated a discussion of Britain as the seat of Biblical
history and eighteenth-century theories on that subject into
his entry for the Druids. The interpolation is natural
enough, and some expert readers looking for information on Blake's
ideas about the relation between Britain and Jerusalem might
think to look under Druids, but not most readers, certainly
(463).
Of course, the converse must be considered as well. While
it is true that print resources are often only as good as their
design, the same holds true for the web. When a researcher enters
into the Blake Archive are they not limited to the programming
of the site's capabilities? Not many scholarly research sites
are as advanced as the Blake Archive. "lso, the editors
for the Blake Archive have managed to formulate a site that is
extremely "user-friendly" considering the large amount
of material that is involved. The more levels or links a web
site has, the farther a researcher can travel from his/her original
point of entry. Programmers must make provisions for web users
to easily return to where they began without becoming lost in
a sea of hypertext links. Otherwise, a research tool such as
a concordance will be able to direct a scholar to information
far more efficiently.
As a point of fact, the simplicity of moving through the Blake
Archive should not be over-stated. The navigations outlined above
were not completed successfully without at least a few wrong
turns and misunderstandings. The first time web researcher who
ventures into hypertext at the prospect of such a treasure trove
as the Blake Archive is sure to meet with some initial frustration.
The directions, as stated previously, are almost cumbersomely
thorough even for the avid web user: "Some users may be
interested to know that DynaWeb's function is to convert from
other DTD's (Document Type Definitions) of SGML (Standard Generalized
Markup Language) to HTML (HyperText Markup Language), using style
sheets" (Blake Archive). While such terminology may sound
foreign to many, to more and more scholars it is becoming quite
common. The primary concern is that the scholar's focus will
drift away from legitimate research and writing and become more
involved with the programming and presentation of a web site.
There is no question that the technical portion that is a necessary
element of hypertext publishing is bleeding into the lives of
academics.
While an in-depth understanding of these more sophisticated
terms and programming techniques are not required to successfully
use the web, many are taking an interest. The "home"
or "main" page of a scholarly web site is not merely
a bland listing of the site's contents. Rather, they are rich
with detailed graphics and intricate programming. The "award
winning" site owes much (many would say too much) to presentation
rather than content.
Undeniably, most people involved in the study of literature
are feeling the push to keep up with technology and at least
be aware of the web as a resource. College students around the
country are finding themselves in classrooms that are requiring
web projects. With the advancements of easy to use software editors
and the prevalence of computers on most college campuses, this
is not surprising.
Case Western Reserve's Seminar on Modernism held in
the Fall of 1997 found a small classroom of students working
together to build a web site as their final project for the class.
Each student was required to do a detailed study of a modernist
figure of his or her choosing and program the research for the
web. "t the center of each student's site was a seminar
length paper. In addition to the paper, students created links
to timelines, scanned photographs and even made audio files available
of certain writers reading from their works.
While many see the web as providing opportunity, many scholars
and teachers view this advancement in a negative light. The "fear"
as teachers is that "technology will deprive our students
of the inestimable value of our presence in the classroom, or
more bluntly, the fear that our presence will no longer be required"
(Unsworth). In addition to these fears and concerns, the scholar/teacher
recognizes that they are in jeopardy of losing a degree of their
prestige. Professors possess a certain "uniqueness,"
to an extent even a "priestly status" in their environment
that is danger of no longer being honored in an electronic setting
(Unsworth). The notion that technology will eliminate the teaching
profession is extreme and unfounded. However, there is no denying
that technology will have its place within education. Indeed,
numerous students are already enrolled in classes offered over
the internet. The lack of a present instructor does not appear
to deter enrollment, rather, many seem quite comfortable with
the idea of hiding behind a computer screen.
To what degree technology and the internet will serve to educate
is uncertain. However, it is clear that teacher to student or
book to student relationships are not going to be the only source
of information dissemination. The emergence of the web as a research
tool brings a new dilemma to the classroom instructor. The fact
that in just a few moments a student could appear as if he or
she had thoroughly foraged through someone like Blake's work
for bard imagery is quite daunting. The print version of Milton
has footnotes that make mention of other bard imagery in Blake's
work. However, the farther a student is removed from the physical
act of researching and reading through other works, the more
the student lacks an in-depth understanding of what he or she
is studying. Certainly, students deny themselves a more complete
understanding of what it is they are researching with this sort
of electronic "scholarship." Kathryn Sutherland ponders
this dilemma further:
Is there a real danger that the scholar-worker, toiling for
years in the remote regions in the library stacks in the hope
of becoming expert in one small field, will be transformed by
the computer into the technician, the nerdy navigator able to
locate, transfer, and appropriate at an even faster rate expert
entries from larger sets of information that he/she no longer
needs or desires to understand? (Sutherland 10).
The development of "nerdy navigators" who have an
excellent understanding of the workings of the web is not inherently
bad as Sutherland may suggest. However, the possibility of the
disappearance of either "need" or "desire"
to do conventional scholarly research is at the very least disturbing.
In addition, the emergence of the web as a research tool has
delivered yet another hurdle for today's writing instructor.
For many students the web all too easily becomes the primary
source for researching a topic. Works cited pages are filling
up with web addresses. The problem regards credibility; anyone
can have a web site. The Cleveland based company Stratos Incorporated
charges a fifty dollar set-up fee for an account with an additional
ten dollars a month fee for server space. Many universities have
free web space available to the ambitious student. Students will
have to quickly realize that there is nothing to guarantee the
integrity of a web page. Someone's hastily posted/published opinion
may be just that. The web is full of poorly researched and unsubstantiated
writing that students and scholars must analyze before incorporating
it into their own research.
While the use of less than credible web sources must be kept
in check, the ease with which writers/critics may make their
presence known on the net is liberating. Many aspiring poets,
fiction writers and literary critics have web sites showcasing
their work. Professors are able to display portions of their
upcoming publications as well as paper topics to be presented
at the next conference. The web provides a means of instantaneous
publication. Perhaps even more importantly, the web provides
instantaneous editing. The editors of the Blake Archive, for
example, can respond to the latest criticism on Blake, post new
images and even change their own minds about what they currently
have posted about Blake in a matter of minutes. Ironically, scholars
writing and researching about hypertext almost have to use the
web to discuss and publish their work. By the time it gets released,
a scholar's recent print publication about the latest technological
advancement is usually outdated by another advancement.
Finally, there is a certain timelessness of the world wide
web that is undoubtedly an asset. Books, unfortunately, are not
forever. Even though the four copies of Blake's Milton a Poem
are stored in a safe, climate controlled environment their pages
will not last forever. This is not to mention the countless historical
texts that still exist today which are not receiving the careful
treatment of Blake's works. There is simply not enough room (and
sadly not enough interest) to properly store these materials.
Ironically, the web is in the position to serve as a back-up
storage facility to ensure the life of the book.
Practical Application
There are several possibilities for incorporating the World
Wide Web into my own ideas regarding the teaching of a composition
class. "s mentioned previously, students will need to be
instructed about the adverse possibilities of web research. The
students would be encouraged to not view the web as a direct
substitution for other types of scholarship. Research papers
will have a cap on the number of web sites that show up on the
works cited page in relation to how many overall sources are
required.
Finally, a toned down version of the previously mentioned
Modernism Seminar assignment for participation in a class-wide
web project is, I believe, a feasible one. Assuming that the
class contains twenty students, four groups of five students
will be responsible for "story-boarding" and conceptualizing
the project on paper. Each group will present their project to
the class and the class will vote on which concept as a whole
they want to adopt. Ideally, the students will find merit in
all the presentations and take on ideas from each of the four
presentations. I will have determined the topic for the papers
that they will be writing for the site at an early point in the
semester. I will serve as the webmaster for the site handling
all of the uploading and management. I will require each of the
students during their conference on this final paper to witness
the uploading process. The idea is not to try and make computer
techs out of the class but to at least give them a small sense
of how the web works behind the scenes. Since this process is
so short, I do not foresee there being any objections as to it
taking away from valuable conference time.
Initially, this project may intimidate some of the students
as it did some graduate students in the Modernism Seminar. However,
it is going to be the composition of the paper that is going
to be stressed as the bulk of the student's grade. The other
portion will be assessed from their participation in class towards
the development of the site and their group presentation. I believe
that such an assignment has the potential to invoke a good deal
of enthusiasm amongst the class.
