Category Archives
December 06, 2007
The Quaker Librarian's Priceless Pages
Instapundit points to a recent editorial controversy at Wikipedia (original article in The Register) and notes, "In any well-functioning anarchy you'll find an old boys' network." While Wikipedia has always faced criticism (and deals with it on a meta-level), this incident points out again the difficulty of providing open access, current material without neglecting the benefit of input from a large body of users. An informative, comprehensive, and reliable site must navigate between the (traditional) rock of dictator-like editorial policies, and the hard place of unmitigated vandalism and triviality. Finnegans Wake - that most apparently anarchic, yet most extensively engineered, novel - provides an example of how this challenge (and others) affects scholarly communication.
By a series of clicks long since forgotten, I wound up wanting to look for some FW resources (the initial motivation for that? - also lost). There are many, including several versions of the full text (or if you'd like some annotations (but if you're pressed for time (or you're REALLY pressed for time))).
As there are books and more books, it is interesting to see that the James Joyce Scholars' Collection makes many secondary works freely available as well (sadly, not Atherton's The Books at the Wake).
Most impressive in conception, perhaps, is the FW Notebooks project at SUNY Buffalo, first announced in 2002. Although an electronic edition is promised, things do not seem to be moving very quickly. As the project is interested in "allow[ing] critical feedback," a collaborative environment makes perfect sense (especially since there will be 55 volumes, currently priced at $116 each). There already exist several such sites for FW, such as Finnegans Wiki and FWEET, and even a nascent attempt at annotating a notebook page. This will present a great challenge to the editors, as Wiki communities break down the more they venture into debate, ambiguity, and controversy.
Are issues of copyright holding back such an electronic edition? FW's copyright status seems to be viewed ambiguously. There have already been extensive copyright issues with Joyce's works, due not only to a copyright extension in the EU, but also to the difficulty of his Joyce's grandson - an article in The New Yorker asked whether he were "suppressing scholarship." As he has already effectively killed the Digital Ulysses Project, and current cop even unintentionally right law can unintentionally doom many works, one wonders whether a return to Macaulay's idea of a more limited term for copyright might not benefit research and the reading public. Otherwise, similar projects may face greater hurdles in the future.
Finally, as the "invisible hand" model of mass action gets criticized enough academically, perhaps it is a good idea to remind ourselves of the dangers of command economies, whether industrial OR informational, by revisiting Hayek's classic The Road to Serfdom ... this version not only open access, but "In Cartoons"!
And the title of this Wake-length post? It's from the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Ulysses, naturally.
-- James Gergel
Posted by colldev at 05:13 PM
