NASSR 96

Electronic Texts and Textuality
NASSR 96 Seminar: Friday 15 November, (9:00-10:30am).

Organized and chaired by Bruce Graver, Providence College

"Electronic Texts and Textuality," was organized so that Romanticists engaged in computer-related research and pedagogical projects might have the opportunity to discuss the practical problems confronting us when we try to adapt information technology to our discipline. Seminar participants come from a wide range of schools: some are from well-endowed research institutions, some from four-year colleges with restrictive budgets, some from somewhere in between. Similarly, the participants have a wide range of interests: some are involved in scholarly editing projects, some in pedagogy, some in the social and academic implications of the new world of URLs and Websites that we find ourselves immersed in. The editing projects alone demonstrate a wide range of expertise and interest: one participant represents the Women Writers Project, the now-venerable pioneer of SGML-based electronic editing; another represents the University of Pennsylvania Frankenstein project, with its experiments in multimedia presentations of its subject; yet a third represents the fledgling electronic Wordsworth Project, recently accepted for publication by Cambridge University Press, and a project that must carve space for itself on shelves laden with the gray-green volumes of the Cornell Wordsworth.

Links to the "Papers" for this session appear below, and besides the papers themselves, responses have been invited from three other seminar participants with particular interests in electronic issues. We also invite further responses from those visiting our site via our interactive User Response Forum.

It is to be hoped that, by means of this seminar and others like it (such as Alan Liu's session at the 1996 MLA convention), we can get beyond the dizzying cyberhype of information technology advocates, some of whom sound disturbingly like Sir Humphry Davy at his blindest, and begin to speak plainly and frankly to each other about what we can do with this technology, what we might want to do, and how best we might go about doing it right now.