Contexts For Electronic Book Research 3: Form and content
A key concern for those interested in the representation and re-presentation of texts in any form has been whether content exists independently and abstractly of its representation by an interface, or whether it exists only concretely, as the sum of its instantiations. One of the problems evident in the field today is the document-mindedness of ideas inherited from (mostly literary) hypertext theorists such as George Landow, who speak of content as links and lexias but almost never as objects, classes, and instances. On the other hand, the field also contains many examples of idealistic approaches to content. One example is the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), an international project developing guidelines for encoding machine-readable electronic texts, with the aim of facilitating activities such as text analysis and sophisticated searching. While the TEI is well suited to encoding print objects (for example, a novel), it becomes confused when dealing with ontologically complex texts like plays, which are neither completely documents nor events. As F.W. Bateson famously phrased the problem, "if the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where [is] Hamlet?" (qtd. in Greetham, p. 342) And if an edition of Hamlet is an interface between the readership and the content, where then does the content begin?
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