| The Complete
Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Archive
|
Currently
in phase two of its projected four-stage development, the Rossetti Archive
nonetheless is complete in its logical structure. It is "is a hypertextual
instrument designed to facilitate the scholarly study of Dante Gabriel
Rossetti . . ." which will "include high-quality digital images,
in full color as necessary, of every surviving documentary state of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti's works: all the manuscripts, proofs, and original editions,
as well as all the drawings, paintings, and designs of various kinds,
including his collaborative photographic and craft work."(3) In building this archive, McGann and the Institute
for Advanced Technology in the Humanities team have encountered technical
difficulties due to its size and, of course, are confronting new copyright
issues, that have provided as much occasion for theorizing the nature
of textuality(4) as they have for discovering
new technical means of practical resolution for these problems.
|
| The
Ivanhoe Game |
The
premise of this game, as McGann and Drucker tell us in describing its
rules, is that every text is in essence a kind of hypertext: "works
of imagination contain within themselves . . . multiple versions of themselves"
(The
Ivanhoe Game). This potential is squelched by what McGann elsewhere
calls "a Romantic hermeneutics" in which texts, "on an
analogy with the Bible, . . . appear to us as massively authoritative
and deeply mysterious, . . . requiring devotional study" of one definitive
version of the text.(5) But great literary texts in fact provide the occasion
for the "unfolding of critical and creative processes in an intertextual
field if read actively through appropriation" ("deformatively").
The rules and results of this game, played originally with Scott's Ivanhoe
but extendable to any text, and played by email, as well as the results
that came from Drucker's and McGann's first rounds of the game, are detailed
at this site. |
Jerome McGann's work in
digital media is just part of his larger, abiding interest in the material
conditions of textuality.(1) Projects
like The Rossetti Archive (see below) are, among other things, textual-critical
experiments in the uses of markup and data-processing environments for
the embodiment, transmission, and ongoing dialogic interpretation of imaginative
texts. He has recently extended these experiments, exploring the ways
digital media might enable collaborative game-play (see The Ivanhoe Game,
below) and "deformance" as scholarly and pedagogical activities.(2)
Some of these matters are taken up in his forthcoming book on literary
studies after the World Wide Web, Radiant Textuality: Literary Studies
After the World Wide Web (Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2001). But,
in addition, he continues his critical and historical investigations of
the media and forms of Romantic-period literature in another new book,
due out from Cambridge University Press in late 2001, Byron and Romanticism.