GULLIVER'S TRAVELS
by JONATHAN SWIFT
GULLIVER'S TRAVELS
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Since I don't imagine someone reading the text online, I haven't designed my Web site with readers in mind. (Of course, I mean for it to be read in the sense that I have tried to produce a legible version of the text. But when I say "reading the text online," I mean "word by word, from beginning to end," as opposed to scanning or studying passages or other, more episodic activities, for which the site is designed.) However, I am aware that this is one of the better copies of the Travels online and people are going to try to read it online. As a concession I've try to make the site "readable," but I don't recommend it.
There are probably a couple of dozen editions of Gulliver's Travels currently in print, many reasonably priced paperbacks, a couple of them good, scholarly editions. (My current favorite is Oxford University Press's World's Classics edition edited by Paul Turner available for $3.95. The Norton Critical Editions are also excellent and affordable.) You may be able to find these and many other editions second-hand. If you want to read the Travels, I recommend you get a book, find a comfortable well-lit place and settle in for a good story.
The Web makes it possible to assemble and integrate all those components into the text itself. I can make pointers to an array of resources beyond anything an individual would be able to collect on their own. In fact, finding some of this material even at a library would take quite a lot of time and work. I also have been able to clip just the relevant bits and pieces of dozens of resources - a bit of Bartlett's Quotations, a chapter from the Humanities Hanbook, a segment from an historical timeline - and interweave them with Swift's text into a whole new kind of resource. The Web's ability to intergrate information in this way is one of the points of this project. Henry Churchyard's Pride and Prejudice site was my first inkling of what could be done.
Another point to the project is demonstrating how rich a resource the WWW is. I've taught introductory classes on the Internet as far back as 1992 and even then it was amazing how much valuable information you can find. In the field of literature, for example, the number of works appearing online grows daily, to the point that any difficulty I've had mounting a small library of related texts is overcome simply by waiting a little longer. Every time I check back something else has been added.
Further, what I cannot find on the Web, I can put there myself. When I decided I wanted to show where you'd find Fetter Lane and the Old Jury, I dug up an old map of London and scanned the parts I needed. I've even convinced some authors of useful essays still under copyright to allow me to reproduce their work at my site.
Therefore, the short answer to the initial question - Why the Web? - is to prove its value as a serious tool for scholarly work. I hope you will agree that this project goes some way towards making that point.