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Canonising Hypertext

June 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

putting literary hypertext into the curriculum?

I remember first coming across hypertext in the early 1990s, and feeling that it was like a glimpse of a newly discovered world. Ted Nelson, Jay Bolter, and George Landow all became my heroes overnight. There wasn’t much you could do with it in those days, outside struggling with a few bits of proprietary software such as Hypercard. But as soon as we got the Web, HTML and the first browser (Mosaic: still got my copy) – we were away!

Canonising HypertextSome hyperfictions had been written at that time – and more have since: stories which exploit the possibilities of non-sequential narratives, hyperlinks between pages (or lexia), multiple navigation systems, and reader-generated choices. Astrid Ensslin thinks these creations deserve more attention. Indeed, she wants to argue that they should be included in the ‘canon’ of literary studies – and this is a book-length explanation of why that should be.

But along the way she takes in lots of other issues. the current state of hypertext writing; educational theories and policies; debates regarding the ‘canon’ of English literature; and IT skills in the classroom. It is something of an uphill struggle, because she is surrounded wherever she looks by a lack of evidence to support her claim or any enthusiasm for its implementation.

As a postmodern critic, she is sceptical about the very notion of a canon, yet she is eager to see examples of hypertexts included within it – seemingly oblivious to the fact that it takes a long time for any writer to be canonized. Even modern classics such as D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce were censored and banned before they became a part of Eng. Lit.

So in the absence of any hypertext in the canon of English Literature, she is forced to propose her own. These turn out to be the fairly well-known Michael Joyce (afternoon), Stuart Moulthorpe (Victory Garden) and Jayne Yellowlees Douglas (I Have Said Nothing). These are the ‘first generation’ of hypertext writers. There are ‘plot summaries’ so far as this is possible with non-sequential writing, yet even whilst making great claims for their work, she is curiously reluctant to quote from them to prove that these qualities exist. [I have checked out the work where it’s accessible, and I can tell you that there is nothing to get excited about.]

[As an aside, I simply cannot understand why so many of these writers imprison themselves within the confines of proprietary software (Eastman’s Storyspace) when the vast, free, and ubiquitous resources of HTML-based multimedia is open to them. Maybe it’s because Eastman also acts as a publishing house, and sells their products on its site?]

She then makes something of a swerve – into the realms of the philosophy of education – before getting back to hypertext in the classroom. There, to what should be nobody’s surprise, there is little evidence of its being used to its full potential, let alone being ‘canonized’. Ensslin huffs and puffs at length considering what could be done, what might be done, and what should be done about it. She even spells out the curriculum for a project she ran – and shows the results, which were ‘encouraging’.

Does any of this alter the potential of literary hypertext? I’m afraid not – because she ignores two very important factors. Number one – every day, millions of people are reading and writing hypertexts on blogs and Wikis (two terms which only crop up once in the whole book). Of course she would argue that the sort of hypertexts she has in mind are creative, literary, and fictional – whereas the majority of bloggers are writing non-fictional prose.

Number two – It doesn’t seem to occur to her that hypertext simply isn’t an appropriate medium for imaginative literature. This is because it lacks the features which readers value very highly in imaginative literary genres – a highly organised and very subtle sense of structure in the work. We like tightly organised plots, themes, symbols, and carefully articulated stories. These are what separate ‘literature’ from plain prose. Moreover, we have prized equally highly, since the middle of the nineteenth century, a subtly controlled point of view. This is not possible if the reader is genuinely free to take any route through a collection of documents or pages.

I have to warn you that she writes in a style which is designed to impress academic promotion committees – turgid, abstract, clotted with qualifiers, over-signposted, and dripping with ‘scholarly references’. At one point I began to suspect that the book might be an undeclared research project – perhaps a postgraduate dissertation or thesis.

Nevertheless, for anyone interested in the subject of electronic writing, hypertext, or experimental narratives, I think it’s worth grappling with the difficulties to get an up-to-date view on the issues.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Astrid Ensslin, Canonizing Hypertext, London: Continuum, 2007, pp.197, ISBN: 0826495583


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Electronic Texts in the Humanities

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Electronic Texts in the Humanities is an excellent overview of the relation between computers and texts. It covers all the essential issues in understanding the latest possibilities of using digitised text in academic study and research. Susan Hockey deals with all aspects of the encoding, markup, and tagging which renders an electronic version of any text searchable and accurate. She also discusses the currently available software and indicates what future developments are required to extend its usefulness. It’s a book which will be of interest to linguists, lexicographers, socio-linguists, literary theorists, historians, and any humanities discipline which relies on the interpretation of texts.

Electronic Texts in the HumanitiesAlong the way she gives an assessment of the existing scholarship in her accounts of research papers and the most recent articles. There are some very useful explanations of SGML and XML, the Dublin Core standards for meta-data, and the Poughkeepsie Principles for encoding and interchange of electronic text. She explains how once a text is in digital form, it can be used to produce concordances, alphabetical listings, and a variety of sortings which can reveal how the same word is used in different contexts. There’s also a chapter describing how literary critics have used computer-generated analysis to assist their interpretations of texts – amongst which she also includes analysis of poetry and non-Latinate languages.

There’s also coverage of corpora – which are large databases of examples from spoken or written sources. These are used as the basis for statistical analysis to show language change, frequency of use, and contextual usages.

This is followed by what’s called ‘stylometry and attribution studies’. That is, making the case that author A wrote text B because of certain measurable word choices or patterns. These quasi-scientific tests have been used to examine cases of disputed authorship such as the Gospels from the Bible and some of the texts in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy. There are also some examples of the shortcomings of these approaches when used in court cases as evidence.

The chapter I found most interesting was on textual criticism and electronic editions. This deals with establishing editorial principles, and it also examines the possibilities of multiple editions (archives) as well as showing how these can be produced in a variety of forms once they have been tagged.

She ends with dictionaries and lexical databases, describing in detail the major enterprise of producing the Oxford English Dictionary, as well as projects which examine old dictionaries to see what they can tell us about the people who compiled them.

This study concentrates on tools and techniques for working with electronic-based sources in the humanities. Its primary audience is teachers and students working in language-based subjects. But it will also be of interest to librarians and information scientists who are now working with electronic texts. For anyone interested in digital writing, it’s worth it for the superb bibliography alone – thirty pages which will take you in whichever direction you wish to go.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Susan Hockey, Electronic Texts in the Humanities, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp.227, ISBN: 0198711956


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Filed Under: Study skills Tagged With: Academic writing, Education, Electronic Texts in the Humanities, Hypertext, Media, Textuality

Hamlet on the Holodeck

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

reflections on hypertext and story-telling

Janet Murray has an intellectual background which will be common to many who have passed through higher education since the 1960s. She is rooted in her training in the humanities (English Literature) – but she has been touched by developments in computer science, and wishes to combine the two disciplines. She holds simultaneously a deep reverence for post-Renaissance book-based traditional learning and an appreciation that digitised texts, non-sequential narratives, and multimedia effects might produce new artistic forms. Hamlet on the Holodeck is an exploration of what has been done to develop these new forms – and what might be done in the future. It is a study which has become a central text in the required reading on hypertext. As a teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – the home of research and development in multimedia – she knows the field well.

Hamlet on the HolodeckHer examination starts with a survey of science fiction and various modern narratives which explore the possibilities of parallel universes or alternative realities – including 3-D movies and virtual reality simulators. She describes the existing technology with enthusiasm – although in each case she ends up in the realm of ‘Imagine if this could be put to use in …’ rather than what has been done. But this is understandable. After all, we are considering an extremely new technology. When printing was first invented, books were produced which imitated written manuscripts, just as in our own age cinema and radio first imitated the live theatre. Maybe the new digital narrative forms have not yet emerged.

She discusses videogames, virtual dungeons (MUDs and MOOs) and literary hypertexts, including the best known – Michael Joyce’s Afternoon and Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden. She also considers the advantages and weaknesses of Web-based narrative experiments. These include the complex worlds which are generated around TV soap operas for instance – which have archives of back footage linked to fan-generated materials.

The main problem is that she doesn’t really confront the most fundamental philosophical principle of fictional narratives. This is that consumers usually want and appreciate a series of events which has been artfully conceived and structured by somebody else. Such narratives represent, in no matter how diffuse a form, a distinctive point of view or perspective on the world.

There is much discussion of journeys through mazes, fantasy quests, dragon-slaying, and all the usual clichés of games with names such as Pong, Zork, and Doom. However, when it comes to predicting what the new forms might be, these tend to be simply different ways of telling the same story – multiple viewpoints – a strategy which has been adopted in most art forms, and which is not intrinsically connected to computers or hypertext. Her arguments and exposition seem more fruitful when she is discussing the rapidly merging world of the Web and television.

Her examination of current multimedia productions is wide-ranging and thorough, although there are one or two assumptions about what is likely to develop which seem open to question. The first is that computers will somehow participate in the generation of basic narratives. The second is that readers will be invited to participate in the story. The third is that a video games or MUDs are likely to be the most likely form to be developed. These are certainly interesting possibilities, but whether they are necessary elements of the new forms or not, only convincing evidence will tell.

However, these are reservations of a rather theoretical nature. At a practical level, anyone interested in the future possibilities of story-telling using computer technology should read this book. Its comprehensive survey of current practice is an inspiring starting point for what might be achieved in the digital future.

© Roy Johnson 2001

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Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, pp.324, ISBN: 0262631873


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Filed Under: Media, Theory Tagged With: Hamlet on the Holodeck, Hypertext, Media theory, Narrative, New media, Theory

Hyper/Text/Theory

July 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature and literary theory in the digital age

George Landow was amongst the early few to spot the similarities between modern literary theory and the technological possibilities of hypertext programmes. This is the third of his publications which explore connexions between them. The general argument he makes is that the digitization of text coupled with the associative links of hypertext represents a development of revolutionary potential.

Hyper/Text/Theory It makes new literary forms available, blurs distinctions between existing genres [‘boundary erasure’] and makes possible anything from multimedia compilations started by authors but completed by their readers, to texts which are ‘unreproducible’ because of their size and their constant revision.

His introductory essay is an invigorating mixture of reports on hypertext projects and visionary ideas of the kind promoted by Jay Bolter and Nicholas Negroponte. Unfortunately, his fellow contributors fail to match his standard. The other essays deal with non-linearity as one of the essential features of hypertext, the politics of this branch of IT, and what promotes itself as new writing – ‘hypertext fiction’, a somewhat dubious notion over which there is still much debate.

They range enthusiastically over topics as diverse as Wittgenstein’s notebooks, films and narratology, and forms of classical rhetoric. But much of their exposition is clogged with silly jargon [‘texton’, ‘scripton’, ‘screener’] which is depressingly rife amidst professionals in the field of cultural studies.

At their worst the essays deal in speculation rather than reporting
on practical experiences or successful projects. Mireille Rosello for instance at one point drops to the level of conceptual art when she spends two or three pages describing what an imaginary hypertext programme could be like. Since there are unsung technical writers out there in the field constructing hypertext programmes for real right now, this is a feeble and self-indulgent substitute. There are just too many questions raised, not enough empirical data or answers.

One further dispiriting feature is the tendency of the authors to draw on the same material, and even worse to quote each other. It is one thing for them to [quite understandably] cite Ted Nelson as a hypertext visionary, but when yet another reference to Thomas Pynchon occurs in the fourth or fifth essay, one wonders if these aren’t the papers of some post-graduate club. This suspicion is reinforced by the tendency for them all to quote from the same fashionable cultural theorists – Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, and Lyotard. The collection ends with a piece of post-Modernist tosh by Gregory L Ulmar which weaves a tissue of non-sequiturs around a contrived verbal connection between Wittgenstein [again] and Carmen Miranda.

In Landow’s own survey of current programmes and projects [written, one supposes, circa 1993/94] it is interesting to note how often he describes the hypertext systems available by using the telling metaphor of a ‘web’ of connexions. The World Wide Web which was under development at that very time now makes available many of the linkages dreamed of from Vannevar Bush onwards. And most importantly, they are available not merely for some technological elite as in the past, but for whoever wishes to use them. This is a democratizing influence which will have a profound effect upon the construction, assembly, and cross-linking of information – and Landow knows it. One of the driving forces behind this collection of essays is to make these possibilities known. I imagine that a further post-WWW volume is on its way right now – but I hope he writes the book himself.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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George P. Landow, (ed) Hyper/Text/Theory, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, pp.379, ISBN: 0801848385


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Hypertext in Hypertext

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

hypertext essays on literature and literary theory

This is a two-disk hypertext version of Landow’s 1992 print publication, Hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. For those who are not acquainted with the original, Landow sets out a case for hypertext which looks at issues of textual authority, intellectual ownership, and the philosophy of a writing which can never be ‘finished’.

Hypertext in HypertextHe notes the similarities between the new technology and contemporary critical theory which seeks to undermine the authority of texts and authors. So what’s new in the electronic version? Well, Landow has included many of the texts from which he quotes in the earlier printed book. There are also essays on Barthes, Bhaktin, and Foucault. He includes reviews of the original book, as well as some (typically feeble) parodies by Malcolm Bradbury.

There are mini-essays from students explaining and often criticizing some of the arguments. Landow observed in the original version that hypertext was ripe for exploiting this all-inclusiveness, and he has been as good as his word by adding material which even undermines his own work in this way. This might be seen as a courageous move from someone who could easily have insisted on absolute textual authority. Alternatively, you could say that it reflects his impregnability in the academic hierarchy. Would someone without tenure dare risk such a venture?

Some material has been added for this hypertext edition. For instance, it includes the text of the original proposal to Johns Hopkins Press: “This project will include …” and so forth. But I’m not so sure that readers want to know about these details of the planning stage. It’s one thing to have the early drafts of “King Lear”, but presenting the outline plans for a book of cultural argument (even an interesting one) is another matter. We warn students against discussing the process of composing their essays. All that’s required is the finished product – not the means by which it arrived.

The bibliographical jump-links are good. This is technology which works more efficiently than a printed book. Strangely enough though, there are not as many notes or pop-up screens as one might expect. Perhaps this is because the basic text was conceived and executed in the Old Days of sequential writing?

What he has done is split the original into smaller sections – but they’re still not small enough. On my 17-inch monitor screen there are ‘pages’ which require so much scrolling that one craves for the start of a paragraph. The fact is that even with a knowledge of the original printed text, reading this version on screen is not easy. It’s difficult to keep any sense of structure in mind. This experience supports the notion that writing for screen and for print require quite different skills.

He argues fairly persuasively that Hypertext is useful in learning the
culture of a discipline, because we can switch easily from the principal text to supplementary readings of it:

hypertext materials provide the student with a means of experiencing the way an expert works in an individual discipline … such a body of electronically linked material also provides the student with an efficient means of learning the vocabulary, strategies, and other aspects of a discipline that constitute its particular culture

Anyone interested in the potential relationships between hypertext and cultural theory should try to see this program in action. It may well be that sustained and continuous arguments made in prose are not actually suitable for this format, but one can hardly blame him for trying out his theories. He could be a little more inventive with his titles, though, couldn’t he?

© Roy Johnson 2000

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George P. Landow, Hypertext in Hypertext, Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, ISBN: 0801848695 (Windows version) ISBN: 0801848709 (Mac version)


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Filed Under: Literary Studies, Media, Theory Tagged With: Electronic Writing, Hypertext, Hypertext in Hypertext, Literary studies

Pause and Effect: the art of interactive narrative

July 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

techniques of telling stories in visual media

Pause and Effect examines the intersection of storytelling, visual arts, new media, and interactivity. It’s a mixture of a little theorising with plenty of practical examples. Mark Meadows starts reasonably well with some interesting reflections on narrative and perspective, and then plunges valiantly into the realm of literary narratives. But before giving himself time to consider them seriously, he’s off into Excel spreadsheets and interactive games. It’s a very elegantly designed book. Almost every page is illustrated with diagrams, screenshots, and paintings.

Click for details at AmazonHe ventures bravely into first, second, and third person narratives, plus point of view. Famous names come thick and fast – Homer, Aristotle, Dostoyevski, Giotto, James Joyce. We get reflections on novels, TV programs, video games, and Spiderman comics. But it’s hard to find a coherent argument. Most of what he has to say is descriptive rather than analytical.

This is a shame, because theoretical reflections on new media design would be very welcome – but here there is the sense of someone struggling with issues which even literary theorists have sorted out long ago.

He does look at some interesting examples of narrative art – religious paintings and tablets. But when you think about it, the traditional narrative painting is ‘cheating’ in terms of conveying a new story. Viewers of ‘The Annunciation’ already know the sequence of events when they see the depiction of them in two dimensions.

There are some interviews with designers of multimedia and interactive events, plus case studies which feature contemporary games designers. He also covers interesting reports of experiments which seek to blend digital genres. Probably the best part of the book however is where he offers reflections on narrative and architecture, second-person point of view, and 3D virtual reality.

This is a publication which will appeal to people who want to pursue ideas about narrative theory. Web designers and new media buffs will certainly pick up some new lines of investigation to think about.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Mark Stephen Meadows, Pause and Effect: the art of interactive narrative, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2003, pp.257, ISBN: 0735711712


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Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads

July 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

academic writing: electronic versus print publishing

It had to happen: an email discussion so interesting, it has been published between paper covers. Don’t be put off by the long title: Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads is the account of a debate which embraces a number of important contemporary issues, from digital publishing to intellectual democracy and the politics of knowledge.

The discussion was one which exploded in the summer of 1994 on the discussion list VPIEJ-L [Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Electronic Journals]. Steven Harnad [then at Princeton] posted a brief article concerning the future of scholarly journals. His argument is that scholars working in what he calls the ‘esoteric’ fields of specialisms (particularly the sciences) do not need to publish on paper; they merely wish to be read by their peers. And since they don’t expect to be paid for what they make public, why shouldn’t they put their work straight onto the Net in preprint form. They can invite comment, make Whatever revisions they feel warranted, then archive the finished article in digital form. By following this procedure, peer review is maintained, but the system works more rapidly and less expensively. Most importantly, they can avoid the dinosaur procedures and high costs of traditional print journals. As he puts it himself (in characteristically succinct form):

What scholars…need is electronic journals that provide (1) rapid, expert peer-review, (2) rapid copy-editing, proofing and publication of accepted articles, (3) rapid, interactive, peer commentary, and (4) a permanent, universally accessible, searchable and retrievable electronic archive.

Many other advantages to this proposal were outlined during the debate which followed. Put everything On-Line, and access is free at the desktop twenty-four hours a day. Scholars in fields such as mathematics are already editing their own work for publication (using TeX) – so why should this work be done again less expertly by editors? Fellow scientists and librarians were quick to see the good sense of these proposals.

Objections followed too, of course. His critics come up with compromise and half-way-house solutions, mainly resting on the ‘tradition’ and ‘authority’ of the refereed and printed journal. But Harnad sticks to his proposal that for esoteric publications where authors simply want their work to be read, and do not expect any payment, there is no reason why their work should pass through the laborious, slow, and very expensive process of print publication.

Having established the ‘Subversive Proposal’, he defends his essentially clear view and simple suggestions against all comers. His are opinions which threaten those who currently control the means of production, distribution, and exchange of intellectual property. He takes on criticisms, subjects his own views to inspection, and sets a tone of ‘collegiate debate’ which is commendable.

The editors have retained on-page some of the typographic flavour of email discussion. There’s a lot of repetition of quotes from earlier messages – as well as some revealing date-stamping, which shows major contributions being answered by others within two hours. Quotations have mercifully been attributed, but for the sort of audience this book is aimed at, this degree of ‘full explanation’ may not really have been necessary. However, this is a very small quibble.

Midway through the debate there is major intervention by Naylor from Southampton University (UK) [where Harnad transferred a few weeks later]. Even though he wishes to support the subversive proposal, he points to the problems it would raise for paper publishers. It is then fascinating to see how Harnad subjects this contribution to rigorous clear-thinking and shows it to be held back by what he calls a “papyrocentric” view of publication. In the course of pursuing this argument he throws up a number of important distinctions to be made about the different forms ‘publication’ may take, and the implications these have for scholarship, economics, and intellectual culture in general.

The other main contributor is Paul Ginsparg, who maintains an archive of scholarly materials at Los Alamos which receives more than 20,000 hits per day. That is, more than twenty thousand physicists from all over the world download articles in electronic form – a medium which as he points out, has advantages possessed by no other:

there are many things that the new medium supports … including the overall fluid nature (on-line annotations, continuously graded refereeing, automated hyperlinks to distributed resources including non-text-based applications) that simply have no analogue in print.

He also mentions – en passant – the advantages of directly digitised text over scanned page images (a ratio of 1 to 500 in disk space required). These exchanges explore in concrete detail the possibilities of electronic publication which have been discussed in theory by people such as Ted Nelson, Jay Bolter, and George Landow. Here we have the financial and practical minutiae of editing, printing, and distributing knowledge in electronic form – with the World Wide Web looming larger and larger as each page is turned.

Discussion of costs becomes very detailed on the varying practices in different disciplines – yet none of the contributors seem to take into account the hidden subsidies of people doing editorial work in time which is paid for or made available by their universities. Bernard Naylor gets near to this point when he queries “the propriety of academic institutions using public money … in order to drive a viable industry … to the wall”. However, his observation is made to cast doubt on the wisdom of scholars exchanging information freely instead of passing it through the hands of all those poor publishers.

There are one or two other academic blind-spots. It would be easy for a reader to get the impression from some contributions that scholars do not profit from their work. This might be true superficially – they will not get rich by selling the words they write. But of course as a result of publishing they are able to secure promotion. The progression from lecturer, to senior lecturer, and on to Professor involves a not-inconsiderable salary increase – and let’s not forget that the writing of these articles and books is often done [largely] in time which is payed for at taxpayers’ or funding agencies’ expense. Which other occupations have paid sabbatical terms and periods of study-leave up to a year long? However, this is another strength of Harnad’s argument. He suggests that electronic publication releases authors from what he calls a Faustian pact with commercial publishers.

On a peripheral note, it is interesting that these experienced and fairly high-level scholars from fields as diverse as mathematics, psychology, and particle physics, all manage to communicate with each other in a manner which is clear, direct, and sometimes quite elegant. None of them resort to the silly show-off jargon of the academically modish and the fashion victims of ‘Cultural Theory’. They don’t even push forward their own subject specialisms, but concentrate on the issue in question – electronic communication between peers.

The more books one reads on electronic publication, Hypertext, and digital technology, the more one realises how convenient, comfortable portable, and aesthetically pleasing the printed book remains – produced by what Nicholas Negroponte describes as “squeezing ink onto dead trees”. But this does not invalidate Harnad’s proposal: if a text is urgent, hot, and written for a minority – we’ll read it on-screen, add comments, and send it back within the hour, rather than wait for the Dinosaur Publishing methods (and timescale) of ‘getting it onto paper’. The editors make the point that there is no sharp ‘answer’ or ‘conclusion’ to these issues. [In fact this debate is still currently raging in the Hypertext-Journal discussion group].

This is a book for specialists, but it encompasses issues which are part of the profound effect of the forces of digitisation and the Internet. The vested interests of commercial publishers and academic institutions may take some time to shift, but their fault lines are remorselessly exposed here. Harnad’s vision and his debate with contemporaries gives us a view of a world which is breaking apart, in the very process of being overtaken by the forces of New Technology.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Ann Okerson and James O’Donnell (eds) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing, An Internet Discussion about Scientific and Scholarly Journals and Their Future, Washington DC: Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing Association of Research Libraries, June 1995, pp.242, ISBN 0918006260


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