Today and tomorrow I’m going to be attending a seminar here in Bergen with Norwegian French scholars of digital scholarly editions. It’s a bit off the track of my main research, but it’ll be interesting to catch up with this field. My first job after my MA involved using A Midsummernight’s Dream as a basis for a MOO for teaching English literature, and along with it, creating an annotated hypertextual edition, which I rather enjoyed, really. My real interests have not really lain in the rigour of XML, DDTs and the Dublin Core, though for that project no doubt they’d all have been useful.
Bergen has lots of people working on digital editions. All of Wittgenstein’s nachlass has been digitalised and tagged in the Wittgenstein Archive. Apparently this involved encoding piles and piles of little “postit notes” he scribbled stuff on. There are projects to digitalise norse literature and diaries and letters and huge corpuses of newspaper material and so on, too. A lot of this is adjacent to work I do, so it’s good to keep in touch with it.
Today’s seminar is part of a rather nice EU project that’s supposed to foster collaboration between France and Norway. So this week French scholars come here, and in September, a group of us will go there – to Lyon. In theory we’re supposed to be writing papers together, but so far I think it looks like we’ll be writing papers individually and discussing them together.
My paper about XML metatagging of electronic fiction has not happened, given as I know heaps about electronic literature but very little about proper uses of XML. I doubt it will ever happen, at least not written by me. Instead I’ll be presenting a paper on feral hypertext, a paper that just got accepted for Hypertext ’05 (they sent me out of the room when they discussed it) and that started from a stray sentence in the French peoples’ initial notes where they referred to the Wikipedia as an example of “textes sauvages”. Wild texts. Text gone feral. Feral hypertexts.
I’ll write more about the feral hypertext thing soon. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it!
