Around Bloomsday, I picked up on a couple of interesting James Joyce
projects: Finnegans
Wake and Ulysses.
Okay, so it’s nothing revolutionary. Wait a second…maybe it is.
See, both projects are making use of blogs to cycle the e-paginations of the
respective novels. The sites run RSS feeds and disburse one page each
day. I’m not sold on the slow-release scheme for each book,
but I am pleased to see the way these blogs are bending the print paradigm into
an alternative textual system–complete with searchability, feeds, archiving,
and free access.
The Ulysses project appears to be the better automated of the two at this stage. If you check the link, you’ll see the entire novel is available in chunks and it’s cycling through on an engine of sorts, chugging through several hundred
pages, one by one over the next two years, automatically. The Finnegan’s Wake
project isn’t entirely online yet, so there’ll be no reading ahead for
now. But FW has comments enabled, so it would be conceivable to
watch discussions unfolding out of each page, not that I have any idea what
those discussions might undertake. No nubo no!
So while it might not seem groundbreaking at first (nor am I sure this kind
of thing hasn’t been done before), I want to watch how it goes. I think it
connects in interesting ways with much of the list-talk about subscription
gouging and digital models for journal distribution (subscriptions, archiving,
access, etc.), news
and entries
about feeds overhauling the browser approach to reading the web, and
transformations of biblio-traditionalisms into what’s rapidly unfolding in front
of us.
Thanks for the kind words on the FW deal.
Since I host it on TypePad, I can’t have the kind of automation the the Ulysses does.
On top of that, I have no scripting skills, but I do have another domain- fw269.com- where I could set up a more automated version. All I need is help.
cheers-
brew
To the extent that you’re handling any of it manually, it’s a provocative piece of work and a suitable example for alternative conversions from print to e-form (bypassing PDF): interesting a all sorts of ways. Even in its bound form, FW calls for a different sort of reading. I can’t help supposing Joyce would have preferred it to be hypertextual (or perhaps it was hypertextual long before e-links, clickability and alt-route reading). Anyway, cool project. I’m happy to have it feeding into my aggregator.