go to The Henry James E-Journal and The Henry James Scholar's Guide to Web Sites


Introduction
 
CYBORG
 
HYPERTEXT
 
VIRTUALITY
 
References
Acknowledgments
 
Print versions:
MS Word
/ PDF

Outline content of a Henry James hypermedia archive

There would be difficult copyright issues with much of this potential content. The archive would need multiple interfaces for different purposes of data-inputting, searching, viewing sources, and outputting of findings.

Bibliographic database of James's publications   An online version as detailed as Edel and Laurence's bibliography.
     
Companion and concordance databases   Developing work such as Gale's Henry James Encyclopedia (1989) and the concordance at Adrian Poole's website (2000-2002).
     
Biographical timeline and notes   Developed from chronologies like those regularly printed in student editions of James's books.
     
Hypertext editions of James's fiction   On a simple level, these would add hot-linked footnotes to existing e-texts.
     
Digital facsimiles of James's manuscripts, periodical publications and book editions   These sources are not generally available in their original form outside research holdings, such as the Houghton library. Online distribution would need to enhance interest in the primary sources themselves, rather than diminish their value.
     
Database listing and archive of film, TV, and radio adaptations   Extracts, stills, screenplays and transcripts in digital form, expanding, for example, on Sarah Koch's filmography.
     
Archive of paperback book covers   A resource for research into global perspectives on James and popular perceptions of his fiction as a "classic" brand.
     
Archive of related critical and contextual sources   As McGann points out when discussing the Rossetti Archive, hypermedia archives are unfinishable in principle, as they can open out into ever wider archives of material potentially relevant to understanding an author's life and work. This open-endedness does not mean that the archive cannot have a coherent structure into which new material can be added.