Paul Delany

Hypermedia and literary studies

From the Publisher: The essays in Hypermedia and Literary Studies discuss the theoretical and practical opportunities and challenges posed by the convergence of hypermedia systems and traditional written texts. They range from the theory and design of literary hypermedia to reports of actual hypermedia projects from secondary school to university and from educational and scholarly to creative applications in poetry and fiction.

The Digital Word: Text-Based Computing in the Humanities

From the Publisher: The sixteen essays collected in The Digital Word continue Landow and Delanys exploration of the new fluid, digitized text begun in Hypermedia and Literary Studies (1991), which focused on the linking of text, graphics, or sound into structures typically bound within a single computer or local-area network. This book explores the larger realm of the knowledge infrastructure where texts are received, reconstructed, and sent over global networks. It covers text management, textual resources and communication, and working with texts. In their introductory essay, Landow and Delany address the impact of such developments as the dematerialization of text (which exists only as a piece of code) and the manipulability of text-based computing (searches, editing, comparison, and analysis), which shifts the balance of power from text to reader. Digital texts; the law, sources, distribution, and management of texts; and the need for new procedures that will make explorations of the boundless universe of text more effective are touched on as well. Current examinations of text management include the FreeText Project and personal information retrieval, a taxonomy of text-management software, and markup systems (including a clear, authoritative discussion of Standard Generalized Markup Languages). Essays in the next section take up such disparate aspects of textual resources and communications as corpus-based linguistics, networked library services, personal docuverses for the individual scholar, and the new forms of scholarly communications created by electronic mail and electronic conferencing. A concluding section on working with texts surveys what has been variously calledcomputer criticism, computer-aided criticism, and electronic text analysis in relation to textual editing, literary interpretation, and our practice of reading and writing in an electronic age. George P. Landow is Professor of English and Art at Brown University. Paul Delany is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

L'ordinateur et la critique littéraire

Computer and literary criticism. Early hopes in a computer-aided scientific literary criticism have long since faded. Further, the computers performance of any set task has proved less significant than its creation of a new kind of mental environment. Hypertext has thus elicited new metaphors supporting post-structuralist criticism and added an extra dimension to narrative writing. The digitisation of texts and the globalisation of networks are likely to be the air that criticism will breathe by the year 2000.

Words, Deeds and Things: Orwell’s Quarrel with Language

‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted onto the table, where a matchbox, half open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf’ (CE, I, 2). For fifteen years the young George Orwell kept up this kind of silent commentary on his daily activities, as if he were simultaneously living his life and writing it. He passed it off as a ‘common habit of children and adolescents’; but the habit started around the time he went to prep school, and it sounds like a classic obsessive symptom — a defence against the fear and loneliness that any child would feel on being sent away from home at the age of eight. The commentary is an endless spell that protects him from the hostile elements of St Cyprian’s. Language runs parallel to reality; perhaps, by sympathetic magic, it may actually control external objects or make them better.