In an essay aptly suited to the neophyte, Faulhaber sets out the history, practical uses, components and current limitations of the ideal electronic critical edition (or "hyperedition") of a literary text. Faulhaber focusses the essay on establishing a model for the ideal hyperedition. He provides a basic overview of how links work and emphasizes the importance of standardized coding for machine-readable text by examining SGML codes and the Text Encoding Initiative. The ideal hyperedition must at least contain the contents and bibliographic information of an ideal printed edition. It would surpass the utility of a print edition by linking to the full texts of "sources, parallel texts, paraphrases, translations of the text, and other texts based on it" (135). Current technology, however, does not quite match up to the needs of the ideal hypertext: scanners do not easily read manuscripts or early printed books; screen-sized fragments of text obscure continuity and are difficult to read. Search mechanisms need to be advanced, as well, to allow for complex queries and morphological searches of non-normalized texts. Faulhaber concludes by noting some of the functions the ideal hyperedition must include, such as a map to the links and the ability for users to annotate the text. (Stephanie Hill Simione.)
Return to Electronic Text: Selective Annotated Bibliography.
Return to home page. 
Michael Hancher

Department of English, University of Minnesota

URL: http://umn.edu/home/mh/ebibshs4.html

Comments to: mh@umn.edu

Created 30 May 1995

Last revised 17 September 1996