In response to the presentations, I began by simply collecting bookmarks for possible hyperlinking--but the pattern they have revealed seems to me extremely interesting and was not, I suspect, just randomly generated.
By "pattern" I mean this: the way in which Laura Mandell spoke about the possibilities of turning the Romantic period's obsession with narrative back upon itself in order to reconceive the field, and how Joe Viscomi expressed his excitement at overcoming the limits of the codex form, while Jack Lynch demonstrated the wonderful, monstrously massive possibilities of this little slab of plastic, the cd-rom, when produced with the resources and goals of a major university press (though, to be fair, that's not precisely the same set of possibilities available on the Web, at least not at present). Similarly, Libby Fay summarized her subtle conceptual models for what she called a "hyperbook," the very term an attempt to animate a new, hybrid kind of Illustrated Primer.
Each of these articulations of the newness of this work and the need for new paradigms demands, as Alan Liu said, that we ask the right kind of critical questions. I would add that these include questions of genre and form--and how genre and form are determined by the material structures (and infrastructures) of this medium. These questions seem to me at least as important to considerations of the "canon" as do questions of which names are on what lists (as Alan has shown, the Web is all about lists)--of which works are included in The Archive. This is not so much about augmenting lists as it is about how we can construct new forms of knowledge-work in our field. That's what I detect as the critical question behind each of these presentations.
I'm the editor of a traditional print journal. The Keats-Shelley Journal Website, however, is not that journal, which is not online. This is more an outpost on the Net, one of those sites that, as Alan has said, serves primarily to "port traditional knowledge to the Web." But I think it's important to see that the results of this "porting," this transference, are not easily predictable. In certain instances the process goes awry or swerves in unexpected directions--sometimes quite productively.
There are materials appearing on this site--such as theater reviews, for example--which could never appear in the print journal (a production in New York is likely to be long-closed by the time the annual journal appears). Or, we can post a relatively personal essay based on someone's walking tour, something outside the boundaries of the established scholarly genres that usually appear in the print journal. Or, we can co-sponsor with other Websites special "preprints" of articles or scholarly documents like the exciting new article on a recently "rediscovered" Keats letter. Such publications are not in the journal, not exactly of it, but are in some sense affiliated with it, connected to it, and in this sense they serve as examples of how editors and peer-review boards can deploy established cultural capital to lever new ventures, other possibilities.
Some of these possibilities use editors and other middle-persons as conduits. Take me, the editor of this journal and also co-editor (with Neil Fraistat, Donald Reiman, and Carl Stahmer) of a new kind of platform for scholarly work, the Romantic Circles Website. An immense number of other workers, editors and contributors all over the world, are collaborating with us at this site. Amongst these, there are multiple connections--of personnel and institution--between the KSJ Website and Romantic Circles, but the lines of connection are complex and still emerging.
On the Romantic Circles home page, our header graphic serves as a kind of masthead, one whose words, in fact, echo that of the KSJ. We specifically list the canonical authors that we have done most of our scholarly work on so far (we've all published on P. B. Shelley). This is where we start. But there is also an entire category, "Contemporaries," which is meant to serve as an open field for further development in other authors and works. The title sphere at the top of the home page, then, is a kind of trojan horse--its list of specific authors is deliberately intended to wither away, eventually, as the centers of gravity at the site shift.
(In fact, let me use this opportunity to put out a call for developers, especially of electronic editions of texts outside the immediate circles of these authors, texts by women authors in particular, but also historical and cultural documents other than literary texts. The "circles" we have in mind are always already expanding, more like concentric ripples than closed coteries.)
But that's just to describe some of the issues facing the e-text archive we're building, really only one portion of Romantic Circles as a whole. The site is best seen as a constellation of distributed sites, each of which is conducting its own experiments into new forms of online scholarship and professional exchange. We even have a MOO, the Villa Diodati, which we expect to provide space for a wide array of presentations, meetings, conferences--and a certain amount of informal chat.
I'd like to return to the animated graphic at the head of this MLA session's page--in which the "WEB" insinuates itself into the frame to bump and jostle the "CANON." While it could be said that the result is only a slight shift and then a re-stabilization, I like to think the final title ("CANONWEB") represents a more significant change than that. I think what's most important to figure--and to foster in our work--as we continue to juxtapose Websites with other Websites, digitized print with fully digital texts, and new forms with established forms of scholarly exchange, is the movement, the conceptual jostling figured in this animation. To pick up on something Jack Lynch said: these lexias, links, texts, and forms can be compared to sub-atomic particles that sometimes "slam into one another", with unpredictable results in terms of the production of new knowledge. In my current Web-based course in Romanticism, students are fruitfully juxtaposing materials from all of the sites discussed by this panel--and then some. Ideally, the sites would be accessible to them all at once in multiple windows--but there would never be enough windows. And, anyway, maybe the shifting relationships of site to site or text to text, as each session at someone's screen is configured and reconfigured, is a good thing. The questions of what is on our lists interests me much less than this potential for ongoing, chaotic jostling on the Web. That's where I see the greatest potential for changing "canons"--by changing to some degree what counts as cultural capital in our field (Amiran, Unsworth, Chaski 1992).
The CANON and the WEB