I usually find attempts to make literature all modern and techy and NEW MEDIA! a little desperate, but this Salon article’s description of a digital version of "The Waste Land", complete with audio performances and visual aids of Ezra Pound’s edits, may have just changed my mind. I remember having to create an annotated version in high school, and having to write in teeeeeensy-tiny letters to fit in all my notes on classical references, earlier drafts, and connections to contemporary history.
I also—and this is probably coming out of my recent viva-studying and associated academic pretension—think it’s particularly fascinating because of how it might provide a workaround for the marginalia dilemma. Notes in the margins or footnotes can often provide useful information for a reader, but the act of providing side information simultaneously distracts the reader from the actual text and places the text underneath the commentary in a hierarchy of time and/or knowledge. Oh god, and there goes my scholarly voice, I REALLY CAN’T STOP IT—but anyone who’s struggled to stop themselves from automatically checking every last gloss, even when they already know what the word being glossed means, knows what I’m talking about. There’s something about providing background knowledge that assumes the reader needs that knowledge, which I think has the potential to create quite a misleading relationship between the writer (or editor, or translator) and the reader.
To be able to provide a text that offers historical or linguistic background without forcing it onto the page with the text, though—that’s a really interesting idea. And note that Miller suggests a digital version of “The Canterbury Tales” as another text ripe for exploring—now, that I can definitely get behind. My boyfriend does keep saying he and I should find a techy project to work on together—I may have to tell him I’ve found just the one…
