On Tue, Aug 16, 2005 at 06:29:04PM -0700, Thad Curtz wrote:
Hi. I'm a college lit teacher and have been thinking about doing footnotes and annotations of the sort most editions for college students supply for some PG classics, so my students could have the usual kinds of help reading them, and print them out, mark them up, bring them to class for discussion, etc. (I think the lack of notes. not the quality of the texts themselves, is currently the main barrier to more widespread use of PG texts in classes.) If I did this, I'd want to make the annotations available free for anybody else who wanted to use them for teaching (or just to read). Some form of structured markup that allowed people to reformat and print to different sizes and devices in the future would be nice, rather than pdfs...
I've looked at the archive, and haven't found any discussion of this topic; any suggestions or advice about such a project (or where to look next) would be appreciated.
It has been discussed a few times before, but perhaps not on this list. You are, of course, welcome to create annotated versions for yourself, and to make them available through your own website. That's great, and we hope it works well for you. However, we will not accept them back for posting into PG as revised texts. If we did, we'd be inundated with Creationists annotating Darwin, Darwinists annotating Genesis, and every nutball who would be instantly removed from the lobby of any publisher wanting to add their essays on The Meaning Of . . . Believe me, they're out there. I've dealt with a few. It's not a practical proposition. Once you allow one person to annotate our texts, you have to give others an equal right, and the whole thing devolves instantly. As for formatting, while XML is theoretically ideal, there are practical issues. Some members of this list are breaking ground in this area, and may be able to make suggestions. Nearly all current markup work uses HTML + CSS, which is pretty flexible, and, as a practical matter, HTML is the Universal Input at the moment -- it can be immediately converted to PDA formats, PDF and so on. If you choose your conventions carefully, HTML or XHTML can be as well-structured as you like. jim