#Age of empires iv predictio full#

Moreover, as digital humanists and book historians design new platforms for exploring textual materials, they have come to emphasize the role of agents around the digital text, such as publishers, librarians, and technicians, as much as the text itself (quoted in Kitzmann 2006, 98). Indeed, in the realm of the web-what hypertext theorist Robert Coover once called a вЂњnoisy, restless, opportunistic, superficial, e-commerce driven, chaotic realm, dominated by hacks, pitchmen and pretenders, in which the quiet voice of literature cannot easily be heardвЂќ (Kitzmann 98)-many other tools and topics now clamor for our attention. In recent years, the media-theoretical implications of hypertext and of the digital edition as the means to create an ideal or archetypal imagining of the text have diminished as new challenges associated with a rapidly growing set of textual platforms, tools, practices, and communities online have emerged. These same approaches were subsequently subject to a downtrend in the light of what Andreas Kitzmann called, in 2006, вЂњthe apparent decline of hypertext, especially in terms of its uses as a vehicle for creative (literary) expression and as a platform for theorizing the nature of reading/writing and the concomitant roles of the reader/writerвЂќ (98). In terms of both the architecture of hypertext and the creation of digital editions, Joyce offered a model and an illustrious ally. For media and textual scholars as divergent as Ted Nelson, George Landow, and Michael Groden, the formal navigation of links seemed to be the most revolutionary feature that would transform digital reading environments, and the creation of multimedia editions emerged as the ultimate challenge of media scholarship.

#Age of empires iv predictio full#

What can we learn from the fate of these projects-particularly, their failure to thrive-in the changing technological and social environments that defined the late age of print and the early age of the web? As I discuss, the prominent role that Joyce once enjoyed in new media studies reflected a compatible (if never unified) suite of approaches to media theory that came into full bloom in the heyday of hypertext theory between the 1970s and early 2000s. This chapter examines some representative artifacts from the graveyard of Joycean digital empires as a way of inquiring into the thinking and conceptual models of the literary scholars whose projects, in a critical wave that peaked in the nineties and early aughts, pioneered what would become known as the digital humanities. Studying Joyce can therefore help us understand a surprising amount about the history of the digital humanities. Even so, for many scholars working to convert the theoretical concepts of new media into principles for scholarly work, Joyce, like Shakespeare, proved good to think with. In fact, Ulysses has become something of a graveyard of empires for DH projects, in the sense that the novelвЂ™s history with the digital humanities between 1970 and about 2000 is more notable for inspiring ambitious ventures that faltered and failed than for producing projects that survived. Not all of these projects were successful, which is to say that not all of them came to fruition or sustained themselves for later scholarly use. in Landow and Delany, 195), and Ulysses in Hypermedia, 2001, a project that вЂњgrows out of and explores the possible connections between Ulysses and hypertext by presenting JoyceвЂ™s book in an electronic media formatвЂќ (Groden, вЂњIntroduction,вЂќ 360). Ulysses, in particular, was seen as an example of hypertext avant la lettre, and JoyceвЂ™s works were made the focus of many pioneering DH projects, such as the James Joyce Text Machine, 2000вЂ“2001, вЂњa collection of machine-readable primary texts, critical commentaries, and related indexes and concordancesвЂќ (qtd. His plays are вЂњgood to think with.вЂќ My interest is in a similar dynamic that shaped the theoretical formulations of scholars working in the early decades of the digital humanities: the example of James Joyce. The example of Shakespeare looms large in the discipline of book history in English, largely because ShakespeareвЂ™s plays present specific problems-the вЂњbadвЂќ quartos, the absence of manuscripts, and so on-that book historians have found useful in working out their theories. PART IV ][ Chapter 29 Joyce and the Graveyard of Digital Empires