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Postmodernism

The Future of Milton on the Web?: Comus.edu

Helen L. Hull, Meg F. Pearson, Erin A. Sadlack

When Jerome McGann wrote his "Rationale of Hypertext" in the early nineties, he sent out a call to the humanities scholar to explore the untapped potential of the Web, to utilize the new tools available for research. For the most part, that call has gone unheeded, especially in Milton studies. This is much to our detriment. While there are some sites, in particular The Milton Room and the John Milton Homepage, that have begun to edit texts for the web and link to other resources, Milton scholars have not yet grasped the extent to which the internet can revolutionize our work. Recently, we decided to accept McGann’s challenge and experiment with how his ideas might transform a scholarly approach to one of Milton’s works, A Maske, by constructing a hypertext edition of the work. We found that in creating an edition designed for the internet, we began to think about both Milton’s text and our research in new ways. Multimedia capacity, limitless space, accessibility and navigability of texts all contribute to the inherent value of the internet. Such features represent particular value to Milton studies because of the sheer variety of the author’s texts and the interest in his composition process, as well as the immense quantity and diversity of his sources. A Maske, in particular, provides a unique opportunity for such a project due to its textual history and the fact that it has continually produced its own re-formations and re-presentations of literary genres and coventions in the years since its first production in 1634. We constructed the website with these aspects of the work in mind, seeking to provide scholars with access to the Trinity manuscript, the Bridgewater manuscript, and the 1637 and 1645 print editions of the text as well as with mechanisms that facilitate exploration and comparisons of A Maske’s different texts and with multimedia representations of the work’s various permutations. We would like to demonstrate briefly a few aspects of the site, explaining how we were able to achieve some of these goals.

However, we also want to suggest some of the ways the internet might further advance Milton scholarship. Working with both the capabilities and the limitations of cyberspace forces us to re-assess our assumptions about theories and methodologies inherent to a scholarship based in a codex culture. For example, the very nature of a hyperediting project shifts the emphases and goals of the editing process. While ultimately the comparison of the print revolution to the internet revolution is valid in many ways, in that both allow for increased access to resources, we believe that Milton scholars will find that the internet revolution is one that will carry us to concepts hitherto unimagined. In many cases the comparison between print and web tempts us to reproduce instead of reform, tying us to the fixed page rather than pushing us into the fluid realm of cyberspace. Our work with Milton’s A Maske indicates that it is no longer enough to simply reproduce the codex online. Learning to explore the internet’s potential benefit to our work can only transform humanities scholarship for the better.