(The word "About" has come to have a specialized meaning in software products, indicating the place, typically, where version or release numbers are to be found, together with copyright information. The present page does not contain that information, which is to be found on the "title page" or linked to it, but instead general information about the kind of edition this is. Several other kinds of introductory information are also to be found in the hypertext itself, in the documents "How to Use This Edition" and "Introduction.")
"Hypertext, a term coined by Theodor H. Nelson in the 1960s, refers . . . to a form of electronic text, a radically new information technology, and a mode of publication. "By 'hypertext,'" Nelson explains, I mean nonsequential writing--text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways.'"
(George P. Landow in Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1992] citing Theodore H. Nelson, Literary Machines [Swarthmore, Pennsylvania: self-published, 1981]).A "hypertext edition," as implemented in the present work, is one that uses the technology of the interactive windowed screen in order to improve upon the print-form scholarly edition. This edition is an attempt to use recent technology to do a number of things that are impossible on the printed page and thus to test a number of approaches to the electronic presentation of Middle English and other texts that may prove useful to scholars and readers in the future.
Two aspects of contemporary user-interface design are critical elements of the potential of electronic hypertexts to surpass traditional printed presentation as a mode of publication for the scholarly edition: the windowing that allows several different documents or parts of documents to be brought to the screen at one time, and hypertext linking, which allows the reader to choose his or her own path through the edition (guided by the editor's preset construction of links).
The first of these, as this edition attempts to demonstrate, can be used to bring a new solution to a problem that editors have puzzled over since the beginning of the scholarly edition, namely how to present the mass of data that the editor has grappled with to the reader. Book-form publication has in the past placed constraints on the possible solutions to this problem, constraints that have in the main resulted in editorial decisions that have limited the reader's ability to examine the data to which the editor has had access. The present edition lays this data, what the actual manuscripts (and early print) are like, what they say, before the reader both in graphic form and in text-file form, in pictures and Web files that the reader can examine and compare, thanks to windowing. Because the windowed screen allows the reader to choose the texts and images that she or he will look at together at any one time, it also gives the reader a freedom and flexibility in arrangement of the elements of the edition that is simply impossible with an unmutilated printed text.
Hypertext linking adds an element of convenience to the medium. Because printed books must map their contents onto discrete surfaces in rigidly defined relation (that is, pages), their ability to alert the reader to relationships between their parts is limited to devices, such as endnotes and cross-references, that in effect instruct the reader to physically turn the pages of the book in order to search for a connected part. Hypertext linking is not conceptually different, but practically it is far superior, because the connections are automated so that the difficulty of following them is considerably diminished. The result is an increased ease for the reader in gaining access to connected materials, a feature that among other uses this edition exploits in connecting traditional ancillary materials, such as notes and glossary, to its main text and also in making connections farther outward, for example from the notes to primary materials mentioned in them.
There are two kinds of frustration which printed editions of medieval texts often cause, and which it is hoped that the present work will in some measure alleviate. The first is the great difficulty that is often part of using what an editor may have given in the way of supplementary and helpful materials. A student encountering Chaucer for the first time in the Riverside Chaucer, for example, must learn to keep one finger in the back-of-the-book glossary and another in the back-of-the-book explanatory notes, and to flip back and forth between the text and these two supports while reading. The result is frequently confusion and anguish. In the present edition, glossary and notes appear on the same screen as the text, and a combination of linking and windowing technologies allows the reader to bring the relevant parts of each to the screen following her or his requirements or interest.
The second frustration is one that affects beginning students less, but is nevertheless one that should concern them: the most common form of printed edition of a medieval text is one that allows the completed labour of the editor to stand between the reader and the extant medieval forms of the work. Sometimes the differences between the edited text and the medieval manuscript copies are presented in the form of textual notes, but these rarely allow the reader to reconstruct in detail the actual readings of any particular copy. The present edition of the Book of the Duchess presents full transcriptions of all of the witnesses to the text, together with photographs of every medieval manuscript page containing the work. Not only do the photographs bring readers closer to the sources of the text than any printed text but a manuscript facsimile could do, but the result is that the readers are in a position to evaluate with full knowledge the decisions the editor has made--and indeed to make different decisions in editing their own texts of the work, should they wish to do so.
We have made use of one further advantage of the electronic medium in publishing this edition, the ease with which new versions of electronic texts can be produced. The reader whose computer has an Internet connection can connect from the CD-ROM to a Web site designed to accompany it. Here, as work progresses, updated or corrected forms can be found (and downloaded) of parts of the edition that have been improved. Readers are invited to participate in the process of improving the edition by e-mailing the general editor at mmcgilli@acs.ucalgary.ca if they spot an error in the edition or have a suggestion for an addition or improvement.