This page is meant primarily as a resource for people with an interest in American Printing History. There's a rich batch of material out there which fairly few people have investigated.
As a student of literature, I feel it's strange that we take so little account for the physicality of the books we read. If semiotics has anything to teach us about this, it's that a Penguin Classic reprint of a novel is not equal to a Podunk Press printing. And it's done much to broaden my understanding of the novel to begin to understand how the physical object is made.
I am an admitted newcomer to the fields of American Printing History, Bibliography, as well as to Webpage Construction, and my use of the technology is simplistic and unexciting. Certainly If I've learned anything from my reading of Hypertext Theory, it's that I have a lot to learn.
Even still, I've made the choice so far with this page to err on the side of information rather than format. Seems to me too many people are just as new and uncomfortable with the technology, and in order to make the page "useful" to those attempting to do research on the subject, it seems the most logical thing to just get the material up there and let the theories accuse as they must.
On the other hand, just putting up an HTML version of a paper on Adam Ramage doesn't seem like the best way to use the technology either. I'm composing this page with an eye towards how I believe Webbrowsers browse, and not necessarily how scholars read. I myself tend to breeze through much of most Web pages, even when they are on topics that interest me. I hope the format here will anticipate, and even invite, that sort of reading, and still be able to give the casual reader some useful information, as well as other places to explore.
Whatever revolutions are going to take place in our reading habits because of the Internet are not going to be enacted by this minor effort. However, if it does help to preserve some information about the difficulties involved in the evolution of the printed word which we take so much for granted, perhaps some light can be similarly shed on how this new media will eventually shape itself.
If you are interested in reading more about hypertext theory, check out George Landow's books, Hypertext and Hyper/Text/Theory, which are enormously useful for putting the material into a theoretical perspective. Landow has a whole page of his own, as you might expect, which has numerous links to his other works.
Back to Ramage page.
Back to Adam's homepage.