McDayter

A new electronic text and digitization project still in its initial planning and design stages, the Milton Archive will feature online electronic editions of works from The University of Western Ontario’s superb collection of Milton and Miltoniana. This paper will detail the ways in which our approach will seek to break new ground in hyperediting.

The Milton Archive seeks to be innovative in two ways. In the first instance, the first stages of the project involve the design, not of an XML encoding system, but of a sophisticated DHTML interface that will, in turn, determine the precise nature of the encoding used for electronic transcriptions and images. This deliberate reversal of the more usual priorities under which such projects such as this one normally proceed embodies the conviction that, while electronic texts need to be both machine- and human-readable, the former is, ultimately, merely the means by which the latter end is implemented. Implicit in this approach is a critique of the tendency to model electronic textuality on the neoPlatonic assumptions that still dominate hyperediting.

A second way in which this projects attempts to move in new directions relates to its approach to the material texts that it is describing. The electronic texts of the Milton Archive will focus upon the description and analysis of the physical volumes that are its subject: in so doing, it will seek to explore more fully ways to reduce some of the abstracting distance between text, and bibliographical description and analysis that characterizes most print and electronic critical editions. Hypertext and image maps will be used to make more “concrete” the conceptual links between bibliographical analysis and material artifact.

This paper will examine some of the fundamental issues raised by this approach, using, where possible, hypertext examples to demonstrate its implications.