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Classical e-books and the end of the endnote
March 16, 2007 | 10:01 am
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By Carol Jurd
Update, 5:21 p.m.: Check out a just-published N.Y. Times piece on, er, footnotes and endnotes in p-editions of the classics! – DR
As the movie makers mine classical literature (Troy and Alexander for example) and documentary makers churn out yet more series on ancient Rome, ancient Egypt, ancient anything, there seems to be a rediscovery of the classics among today’s readers. Modern geeks reading the works of ancient geeks? The article Classics in the Slums points out that not all readers are or have been literary high-brows.
If reading the real story of Troy sounds appealing, try Textkit or Perseus—set up for fans of Latin and ancient Greek. Textkit has opted for scanned out-of-copyright texts in PDF format, Perseus favours HTML versions. Many of theses original books would now be out of print or valuable antiques.
The glories of hyperlinks in classics
And now the problem—all these textbooks seem to have one thing in common, reams of footnotes, endnotes and pages of explanatory material. To get your head around something written over 2000 years ago requires more than reading skills. After all, what is a ballista, a rhapsode and where was Troy? My copy of the first twelve books (chapters?) of the Illiad is 630 pages long, and the actual text takes up less than half of this. So how should this be addressed in e-books?
The History EBook Project suggests pop up windows, Perseus uses hyperlinks and any site reproducing old books in PDF format sends you back to the old method of lots of sticky notes, and that’s if you print a paper copy. This isn’t just a problem for ancient texts, even books written 50 or 60 years ago will confuse a 15 year old studying English literature.
Beyond the current referencing system
Maybe we need to think outside the square with this (think of Introducing the Book) and not get locked into something like the current referencing system. What kid using Google and the IPod is going to want to cope with the archaic method of looking up footnotes? Perhaps we should hand this over to Apple for a make-over.
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Comments:
With HTML small notes can be included as “name” attributes in a link — a sort of lazy-man’s popup. When you hover your cursor over the link, the contents of the “name” appear. This could well be done for simple obsolete words that might be found in a glossary, for example.
Not sure how well this would work with a PDA, smart-phone, or other ebook device.
beautiful image. where is it from?
The Troy article I linked to—in the Wikipedia. I hope you enjoyed Carol’s wonderful article as well. Thanks. David
Check out http://www.parc.com/fluid/, an old project of ours in more e-natural annotation forms.
“Update, 5:21 p.m.: Check out a just-published N.Y. Times piece on, er, footnotes and endnotes in p-editions of the classics! – DR”
What a crazy coincidence! Especially as William Grimes and I must have been writing these articles at the same time (about 10 days ago).
On Perseus, every reference to (say) “Troy” is highlighted and underlined in what we all know as “hyperlink blue”. Is that necessary/desirable? As a reader, I mean, not a hyperlink fetishist, and god knows I loooove hyperlinks, even more than I loooove paper.
Also, regarding the following:
“To get your head around something written over 2000 years ago requires more than reading skills.”
I’m not sure what the writer means by “requires more than reading skills” (except perhaps “research skills”) but this is not addressed in the article. Instead we go right to “How should this addressed in e-books?” How should what be addressed in e-books?
Can hyperlinks in academic texts increase the information available with the click of the mouse but weaken our research skills (i.e., the task of learning how to search for information when it’s not hyperlinked for us)?