Michael Groden
"James Joyce's Ulysses in Hypermedia": Problems of Annotation

Ulysses in Hypermedia

I am the Director of a project, "James Joyce's Ulysses in Hypermedia," that will present Joyce’s book in an electronic, hypermedia format. The project, whose target release date is June 16, 2004 (the one-hundredth anniversary of the day on which Ulysses takes place), will probably be published as a DVD-ROM, with a substantial Web component. Its publisher is the University of Pennsylvania Press, and it has received initial support from the University of Western Ontario's Academic Development Fund and from Eyebeam Atelier, Inc.

A great deal of material will be part of the presentation, including:

the full text of Ulysses maps

specific words and phrases linked to:
    definitions and annotations
    extended analyses and commentary
    photographs

an oral pronunciation guide
videos in several versions audio readings from quoted or cited works
songs  

More extended sections of Ulysses will be linked other kinds of materials, all coordinated to the passage of Ulysses that is on the screen:

an archive of published scholarship biographical and historical background material
newly written hypertext criticism

oral readings of Ulysses

literary works that are quoted or referred to or echoed filmed excerpts of Ulysses

Readers will be able to bookmark their place and take notes for future use. The presentation is designed to allow the simplest possible ways of navigating through the vast amounts of available material. As with any hypertext, readers will be offered multiple pathways through the materials, and they can choose which information and how much detail they want to see.

Presenting any print-based text in digital format inevitably changes it, and those changes affect annotation in important ways.


Screens in This Section
Ulysses in Hypermedia
Print-Based Work: Incomplete

Sections
Title Screen
Introduction
The Hypermedia Project
A Passage from Ulysses
Questions Regarding Annotations
Eight Possible Presentations
Works Cited