The Rationale of HyperText

McGann, Jerome. "The Rationale of Hypertext." (1995) ADHO

McGann's article, which from beginning from the title (clearly allusive to Greg's famous essay) discloses its ambition of establishing itself as a seminal work in a brand-new field, tackles the unavoidable notion that in today's increasingly computerized academia, scholars must "learn to use a new set of scholarly tools".

Why does the electronic medium offer boundless possibility to the critical editing of texts? Firstly, because to "deploy a book form to study another book form" presents a myriad of problems, including the necessity of apparati, notes, shorthand reference forms, bibliographies, and so forth. In short, "no single book or manageable set of books can incorporate for analysis all of the relevant documents". Furthermore, computerization allows for easy access to material not reproduceable in book form: the declamation of a poem, the performance of a play, In a virtual space, a book's "semantic and visual features", together with any amount of secondary literature, "can be made simultaneously present to each other". Many of the advantages, like not having to travel thousands of miles, or even to the nearest well-equipped library or video-store, are self-evident.

In the following section, McGann defines the concepts of hyperediting and hypermedia programs, which do not necesseraly entail the use of hypertext (nevertheless preferable, since it enables to quickly move through large masses of documents in complex ways), but require that "they have the power to include audial and/or visual documents in the system".

Next, the author argues for the "necessity of hypermedia" through a series of examples.

a)Robert Burns' ballads such as "Tam Glen" were written to existing popular melodies and composed with a focus on orality rather than textuality: they were intended to be sung and heard more than to be read. Why, therefore, would anyone prefer a book-form critical edition of Burns's complete works "to an equivalent edition based primarily on audial texts?"

b) The second example involves Blake, whose use of visual materials is so crucial to the whole of his literary corpus that no book form could possibly provide an adequate edition of his work. But something tells me we will have the chance to examine Blake's case more thoroughly in weeks to come.

c) McGann also mention the handycraft character of many Emily Dickinson's poems, who, for example, by attaching a postage stamp to the sheet of paper she would then write on, was creating "a kind of gravitational field for her writing".

d) Here the author mentions the case of pictury-poetry, a meteor-like genre that rose to prominence in the early 19th century, and the example of Laetitia Landon's work, impossible to properly approach without the incorporation of much visual material.

e) McGann mentions the latest critical edition of Wordsworth's Prelude, and the fact that this massive scholarly endeavor nevertheless failed, mostly for practical reasons, to include a critical edition of the "five book" version of the work. Similar problems could be easily avoiding with a hypermedia-based approach.

Next, the author discusses the implementation of his ideas in his own Rossetti Archive, together with the ulterior benefits that were revealed in the process of creating it (like the beauty of being able to change, revise, add and expand without the need for publishing a new book) and the arisal of new problems that traditional book-form editing did not present (like "how to incorporate digitized images into the computational field").

In the coda, McGann argues that HyperEditing requires a well-planned structure and must be organized according to logical principles, but like a library (the structure it most resembles), it is intended for "indefinite expansion". Therefore, in the author's view there is no need for a "central text" around which to organize the system, contrary to what many other theorists advocated at the time (and perhaps still now).