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

Introduction

The footnote, once considered the treasure of a special artistic talent, has sunk in reputation to a bauble at the bottom of a scholar's page. And yet a footnote – an expository addendum to the text, an annotation, a reference – exhibits a fascinatingly complex set of possible relationships with the text to which it refers. When a text like James Joyce's Ulysses enters the picture, and digital hypermedia is the medium, the entire question of footnotes and annotations needs to be rethought.

Undergraduate English students probably first encounter annotations and footnotes in The Norton Anthology of English Literature or another college textbook. They squint to decipher the tiny bits of information at the bottom of the page and then return to the text at the top either appreciative or frustrated. They seem to form a judgment quickly that footnoted annotations are either useful places to find what they need to know or repositories of strangely arcane and irrelevant displays of knowledge.

Graduate students learn that creating footnotes as references to, and also as extensions of, the main text's argument is an essential part of scholarly work, and the first stage in my professional relationship with footnotes consisted of becoming proficient at writing them. The second stage involved reading other people's footnotes with interest and also skepticism, occasionally reading the footnotes before and maybe even in place of the main text. In the third stage, I stopped reading footnotes entirely, simply skipping them whenever a text included them. In the fourth (current) stage, I try to write whenever I can without using them.

For a long time, it was recognized that the writing of footnotes involved particular, uncommon skills. For the most part, this isn't the case now.

Procedures: On a screen, I can't provide footnotes at all. The bottom of the screen doesn't mean the same thing spatially as the foot of a page (text on top, note at bottom). I could provide notes at the end of long electronic "page," but that would be just a screen imitation of a printed text. Instead, I'll let notes pop up on the screen when you ask for them by clicking on linked words that are in italics. If you click on an asterisk after an author's name*, you will go to the article's bibliography and find a full reference to the work referred to. Following linked words in Roman type will take you to other pages in this article or to other Web sites.

The screens proceed in a sequence, but I have tried to design them so that they can be read in any order.