To return, then, to
our current Twain project: In the
realm of the scholarly or critical edition of a literary work, XML seems to
need no justification: it is the
perfect marriage of form and function.
XML is an ideal technology for displaying and organizing text at the
level of the sentence, the word, even the bibliographic note. It makes manifest the kind of fine
attention to textual detail that is the hallmark of the critical
edition. It also enables the kind of
integrated search and display functionality that could render these critical
editions even richer and more suggestive as research tools. |
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As an archive and
a scholarly editorial project, the Mark Twain Project and Papers at UC
Berkeley’s Bancroft Library is in the rare position of being able to provide
immediate access to both primary and secondary sources. The Papers are keen to develop an online
system for integrating these two functions – thus creating critical editions
of Twain’s writings that allow for a level of interactivity and integrated
reading experience that is unimaginable in a print edition. At its most basic level, the digital
Project will fold Mark Twain’s private papers, comprehensive historical
annotation and complete critical apparatuses into the texts themselves. The
project aims to provide unprecedented digital access to critical editions of
all of Mark Twain’s writings, starting with the works and papers that have
already been published by the UC Press in print form and with thousands of
additional letters by Mark Twain never before made available in a single
source. |
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