Answers–details in items below:
1: Books.Google–73; 2: Project Muse–1; 3: Making of America–18, 19; 4: SSSL–41; 5: Poe Society of Baltimore–51; 6: Wikipedia–15; 7: Poe Society of Baltimore–56 and Edgar Allan Poe Review–57; 8: Amazon–77; 9: Proquest APSeries Online–6; and 10: "A Tour"–89-96.
.)
Resist the impulsive to begin all electronic research with a Web search—electronic research experts suggest that you start instead with a university-based Web directory, such as Librarians' Internet Index or Infomine. Although academic-based Web directories do not closely follow Library of Congress subject headings, at least they offer some logical structure as they lead, typically, through structures such as Arts and Humanities, Literature, American Literature, and 19th Century to arrive at Poe.
7. LII: The Librarians' Internet Index: A rich starting point of 20,000 web sites created and maintained by the state library of California under the slogan: "Websites You Can Trust": http://lii.org. Go to "Arts & Humanities" and then "Literature & Books." The search for "Edgar Allan Poe" produces nine highly selected and well-annotated matches.
8. Infomine: Social Sciences and Humanities: This site, maintained by the University of California, supports searched for bibliographical descriptors of author, title, or subject: http://infomine.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/search?category=liberal. The request for "Edgar Allan Poe" produces 21 selective matches.
9. Intute: Produced by a consortium of seven British universities and partners, this collection of over 110,000 Web resources specializes in educational and research materials, replacing Humbul, the "humanities bulletin board", one of the first British centers for literary computing online. Intute provides valuable support and training materials for Internet research and information literacy. Its main Web links are well-edited and have intelligent annotations; its subsidiary links are produced by browsing its main sites and "harvesting" the results into a less selective database—called Harvester. The site also offers literary news, blogs, timelines, and links to electronic journals: http://www.intute.ac.uk/.
See also:
10. Library of Congress: In addition to maintaining the U. S. copyright repository, the Library of Congress supports a distinguished Web site with the American Memory project and other significant digital offerings: http://www.loc.gov. The search for "Edgar Allan Poe" yields 181 matches on its Web site. See also:
11. The British Library, formerly the British Museum, maintains an extensive list of 10,000 Web pages: http://www.bl.uk. The search for "Edgar Allan Poe" yields 15 excellent matches. See also:
Note: the Google, Netscape, and Yahoo! search engines also maintain valuable subject directories (see below).
Online encyclopedias should not be overlooked for direct access to common information.
12. About.Com: An encyclopedic repository of content assembled by 600 expert guides, owned by The New York Times: http://about.com. A search yields 4,960 matches for "Edgar Allan Poe."
13. Answers.Com: Selected passages on Poe from 11 sources such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, Columbia Encyclopedia and reference works from Oxford and Houghton Mifflin: http://www.answers.com.
14. Infoplease: Combines a search of several almanacs, encyclopedias, and biographies: http://www.infoplease.com. Yields 120 matches for "Edgar Allan Poe."
15. Wikipedia is a popular site now grown to seven million pages, produced by a loose network of volunteers using wiki software for collaboration. The main Poe page provides a useful survey of his life, death, theories, works, and
influence, with attention to media and popular culture and links to 29 Wikipedia pages on additional Poe works and topics. Exclusive reliance on Wikipedia earns ridicule in some educational circles but so would excessive dependence on the Britannica. Wikipedia is generally useful for information on topics too new or too specific to be included in standard printed encyclopedias, such as recent theories of Poe's death or the identity of the "Poe toaster": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe. Wikipedia sites in other languages reflect different national views of Poe and also contain useful links to Poe texts in translation:
16. Bartleby combines access to the Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed., American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd. ed (1996); Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, 3rd ed (1995); Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 9th ed (1901); the Cambridge History of English and American Literature (18 vols, 1907-21), and other works: http://www.bartleby.com. A search for "Edgar Allan Poe" yields 296 matches.
17. Bibliomania Reference: Access to works identified only as Brewer's Phrase and Fable (n.d.) and Webster's Dictionary (1913), with eight other reference works: http://www.bibliomania.com/2/3/frameset.html.
As scholarly libraries run out of shelf space, permanent Internet archives are expanding yearly without physical limit. Large scale scanning projects involving millions of books are under way to produce graphical page images in PDF or TIFF format; these images are then converted into electronic texts. The search engines of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft MSN have also undertaken massive rival projects to scan millions of books in libraries in order to make them available as Internet archives, and the online bookseller Amazon has undertaken a comparable project (see Search Engines, below).
18. Making of America: University of Michigan: The Making of America project at Michigan is a massive digitization and preservation project of 10,000 books and 50,000 journal articles from its 19th century holdings that were too bulky and fragile for storage in annexes: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moagrp. A search for "Edgar Allan Poe" produces 450 matches in 98 books and 133 journal articles (for "Poe," 7762 matches in 2054 books or journals). MOA contains a complete run of the Southern Literary Messenger.
19. Making of America: Cornell University: An archive of 907,750 scanned pages, including 267 books and 955 volumes of serials from the 19th century holdings of the Cornell libraries: http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/moa_search.html. A search for "Edgar Allan Poe" produces matches in 2 books and 156 journal articles (for "Poe," 4825 items in 1950 books or journals).
20. Internet Archive: The Internet Archive contains an extensive collection of books and films in the public domain, including 181 Poe books or media items, primarily from the holdings of the University of California and the University Toronto under the Open Content Alliance (OCA). Unfortunately, as in other projects of this type, the bibliographic descriptions are sketchy. Initally, the Internet Archive was known for its remarkable Wayback Machine, a collection of snapshots of Web pages made at different times since the 1990s: http://www.archive.org.
21. Resources for Research: Periodicals (RSAP): Valuable lists of 19th century periodicals that are available online at the Web sites of the the Cornell MOA, Michigan MOA, Pennsylvania On-Line Books, and Project Gutenberg: http://home.earthlink.net/~ellengarvey/rsapresource1.html.
22. The Internet Library of Early Journals (ILEJ): Page images of six British journals of the 18th and 19th century, including Blackwell's: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/. Eight matches for "Edgar Allan Poe" appear in Notes and Queries (1857-1868).
23. Netsurfer Digest: A weekly report to subscribers on selected current web sites, issued between 1994 and 2005, and now archived: http://netsurf.com/nsd. See also the Internet Scout Project (Wisconsin): Weekly reports on the Internet, the library, and computer science to 250,000 subscribers: http://scout.wisc.edu/.
24. James Harner, Literary Research Guide: Working notes online for the next edition of his Literary Research Guide (MLA): http://www-english.tamu.edu/index.php?id=924/.
25. Jack Lynch: Literary Resources on the Net: A fine, selective starting site for finding and searching literary resources on the Web, maintained by Jack Lynch: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/american.html. Scroll down to Poe.
26. Voice of the Shuttle: Started in 1994 by Alan Liu as a fixed outline of humanities sites on the Internet, Voice of the Shuttle was converted in 2001 to a searchable database supporting Boolean queries. It contains Web pages for e-texts, theory, criticism, and syllabi, all classified by nationality, period, author, genre, and topic. It is the most extensive repository of humanities websites available anywhere, but it sheer size may make it difficult to query: http:vos.ucsb.edu. See also:
Guides:
27. "Literature in Electronic Format" (Choice): Based on "Literature in Electronic Format: The Traditional English and American Canon," by Joanne Gates, published in the April 1997 issue of Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, v. 34, no. 8, pp. 1279-1296. Useful but outdated: http://www.jsu.edu/depart/english/choice.htm.
28. The OnLine Books Page: This well-established index at Penn lists 25,000 free e-texts on the Web, arranged by author, title, and subject: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/index.html. Select "Authors" and then scroll down to "Poe" for some thirty Poe collections or works digitized at electronic text sites—or go directly to
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Poe%2c%20Edgar%20Allan%2c%201809%2d1849,
29. Eserver: Dozens of literary and humanistic categories, from an e-publishing co-op now at Iowa State University, yielding 12,284 matches for "Edgar Allan Poe": http://www.eserver.org.
30. Penn State Online Reference Shelf: Full Text: A global guide to Web sites for full e-texts, arranged by geography and period: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/gateway/referenceshelf/fulltextlit.htm.
31. Digital Book Index yields about 200 listings under "Poe, Edgar Allan" after free registration and login. In addition to the more commonly encountered formats, Txt-G (Gutenberg),
HTML, and PDF, the site contains information on unusual text formats such as Graphic, MSReader, NetLibrary, On-Line, Palm (A and P), MM (multimedia), Adobe (eBook), Palm (AportisDoc, Pocket PC, Windows CE), and Gemstar (RCA, RocketBook). The entire site links to 135,000 title records from 1,800 commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities, and private sites: http://www.digitalbookindex.org.
Text Collections:
When electronic texts are available on the Internet, they can be highly convenient, but it should never be assumed that they are identical to printed texts, even when the sources are identified. Visual images in PDF or TIFF format are reliable but hard to use. The process that converts those images to flexible electronic texts, optical character recognition (OCR), is subject to a small degree of error, requiring more scrupulous verification than is sometimes performed. In the 1990s some questionable Poe texts made the rounds of the Oxford Text Archive (OTA), the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center (ETC), and the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI), indicating that at times even the name of prestigous archives may not be a guarantee or reliability. In one case, unpaginated texts were given an air of reliability by the addition of page numbers from the Harrison edition, even though the texts themselves cam from a less reliable sources.
In general, electronic texts are of four kinds: 1) scanned images, which are highly reliable but rather inflexible, such as those in the Geodesic Poe CD-ROM, the Making of America archives at Michigan and Cornell, and the Proquest American Periodical Series, 2) electronic texts produced by OCR from these images, which are more convenient but contain a small residue of error introduced by the conversion process, 3) tagged electronic texts, formatted to resemble known printed editions but introducing even more possibiities of error, such as those with extensive TEI or XML coding in the Virgina and North Carolina archives, or minimal HTML codes in the Poe Society of Baltimore, and 4) unencoded or "vanilla" texts, widely available but lacking encoding or verification, such as those at Project Gutenberg. Ideally, an electronic text should fully correpond in contents and formatting to a reputable scholarly edition, but full verification that elminates the last one or two percentage points of error, as critical textual studies require, may be difficult to obtain. Fortunately, more known Poe texts are beginning to appear gradually in electronic form, as volumes of the Griswold and Harrison editions appear in Books.Google and the Open Content Alliance at the Internet Archive, and in the Mabbott and the Library of America editions of available under controlled conditions at Amazon.
On balance, the best repository of currently available Poe e-texts is at the Web site of the Poe Society of Baltimore: it is the most comprehensive, most historically conscious, and best edited collection, and it is paginated to known Poe editions. The complete Chadwyck-Healey collection of Poe editions requires a commercial subscription to LiON (Literature Online), but a selected edition, the two volume Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) is available in the Early American Fiction collection at the University of Virginia. The 1840 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque and the two 1845 volumes, Tales and The Raven and Other Poems are part of the Documenting the Literature of the South collection at the University of North Carolina.
32. The Poe Society of Baltimore contains the most comprehensive collection of Poe's works, specializing in variants of works published in his lifetime, including many lesser works and hard to find articles and reviews: http://www.eapoe.org/works/index.htm. (For details, See below.)
33. The Early American Fiction project at the University of Virginia contains Tales of the Grotesque & Arabesque, (2 vols., Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1840): http://etext.virginia.edu/eaf/authors/eap.htm. At this site The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Tales (1845), and The Raven (1845) have usage restrictions.
34. Documenting the American South at the University of North Carolina. A rich collection that includes Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) and The Raven and Other Poems and Tales (both New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845): http://docsouth.unc.edu/browse/author/p.html. Scroll down to Poe. (Some historical spellings in Poe's Tales may bave been jeopardized by systematic auto-correction: "Spell-check and verification made against printed text using Author/Editor [SoftQuad] and Microsoft Word spell checkers":
http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/poe/poe.html.)
35. The Complete Poems (1911), ed. J. H. Whitty, in the American Verse Project, Humanities Text Initiative (HTI), University of Michigan, has 86 pages of introductory matter and 297 pages of editorial commentary: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=amverse;cc=amverse;view=toc;idno=BAD9210.0001.001. Be warned that Whitty's text contains nine poems of doubtful authorship (Mabbott, Collected Works, 1:593).
36. Penn State Electronic Classics Series: Palimpsest Online! A five volume works from an unidentified edition, scanned as page images in PDF for Adobe Reader: http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/poe.htm.
37. The Borzoi edition (ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn and Edward H. O'Neill, 2 v. New York: Knopf, 1946) is apparently the source of the texts in Eric Lease Morgan's Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts, among the first collections of electronic texts to appear on the Internet. http://www.infomotions.com/alex/?cmd=names<r=P. Scroll down to Poe for about 130 items:
38. Toronto's Representative Poetry Online contains well annotated editions of eight Poe poems, edited by Ian Lancashire and others, with line-encoded notes and publication histories that cite editions in Poe's lifetime, annotations in the J. Lorimer Graham copy, and editions by Griswold (1850) and Mabbott (1969): http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poet/262.html.
39. Project Gutenberg: The earliest and still the largest archive of free and unformatted literary e-texts, contains the complete five-volume "Raven" edition of Poe (New York: Collier, 1903) among its 33 Poe items. In providing as many plain or "vanilla" texts as possible, the project has not generally verified its texts or identified their sources: http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/p#a481. The related Project Gutenberg Europe site has links to text resources in 58 languages (not all of them European): http://pge.rastko.net.
40. Thirty-two Poe works in MS Reader ebook format are at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-ebooks?specfile=%2Ftexts%2Fenglish%2Febooks%2Febooks.o2w&query=Poe%2C+Edgar%20Allan&docs=mainauthor&sample=1-100&grouping=work.
41. Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL) Bibliography: This annotated, chronological bibliography (with abstracts) of articles on Poe ranges from 1965 to 2006 but is thin in its coverage of recent years. The entire site has more than 21,000 articles on 1,000 writers, William Faulkner being in first place with 2,675 matches, followed by Mark Twain in second place with 1,473, and Poe in third place with 1,386: http://www.missq.msstate.edu/sssl/view.php?wid=26.
42. MLA Formatting and Style Guide ( Purdue): An online source for the MLA citation guidelines: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/01/—not offered at the MLA's own Web site.
43. "Literary Theory" (C&RL News): Based on "Literary Theory: A guide to critical theory resources on the Internet" in College and Research Library News, [C&RL News], March 2002, Vol. 63 No. 3. by Julie Roberson, Debora Richey, and Mona Kratzert. "Selected guide to some of the more understandable and useful Web resources devoted to contemporary theory. The introductory sites are helpful for describing the various schools of criticism, while the theorist and theoretical sites concentrate on specific critical approaches." Includes sections for reference sources, introductory sites, megasites, theorists, theoretical approaches, and electronic journals: http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crlnews/backissues2002/march/literarytheory.cfm.
44. Introductory Guide to Critical Theory: Modules by Dino Fulluga on Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Barthes, Foucault, Judith Butler, Marx, Jameson, Greenblatt, Baudrillard, and others: http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/index.html.
45. Internet Public Library: A convenient starting point for sample criticisms on the Web, produced by The iSchool at Drexel, College of Information Science and Technology, with support from the College of Information at Florida State University and its founder, the University of Michigan School of Information: http://www.ipl.org/. See also:
46. Studies in Bibliography: Searchable index to Studies in Bibliography (20 Poe items): http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/bsuva/sb/.
Commercial Sources for Literary Criticism:
Commercial databases of literary criticism provide ready material for student course papers without requiring much research. Although there is a usually a fee for such papers, the accompanying bibliographical indexes and abstracts are gratis.
47. Questia: Its claim: "Questia is the world's largest online library of books, with over 67,000 full-text books, 1.5 million articles, and an entire reference set complete with a dictionary, encyclopedia, and thesaurus": http://www.questia.com/Index.jsp. A search for "Edgar Allan Poe" produces 3,808 results, including 3,085 books. 378 journal articles, 151 magazine articles, and 173 newspaper articles. Subscriptions are available by the year, quarter, or month.
48. Findarticles: http://findarticles.com. A medley of 1,460 articles from Bnet Research on "Edgar Allan Poe," 857 of them gratis and 603 requiring a fee,
49. Highbeam: http://highbeam.com. An archive of 5,430 matches for "Edgar Allan Poe" from journal and newspaper articles. The seven day trial provides unlimited full membership; the gratis membership provides limited access,
50. Elibrary: http://www.elibrary.com. Information on subscriptions is available from Proquest.
51. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore: The leading Poe Web site for serious research, intellectually ambitious and critically significant, fully deserving the attention of Poe scholars and suitable for use by graduate students and upper-level undergraduates. Its multiple levels include Poe bibliography, a full selection of Poe e-texts, and recent scholarly currents. The goal of this site under Mr. Jeffrey Savoye is to post an outline of everything Poe wrote and then to provide e-texts reflecting a sampling of his variants and versions, paginated against the historical editions upon which they are based. Although the organization of the site could be clearer, it remains especially valuable for hard-to-find e-texts of Poe's minor works, such as "Autography," "The Literati," "Marginalia," "The Journal of Julius Rodman," and his non-fiction articles, reviews, and notices. In addition, the site serves as a electronic repository for scholarly materials, such as the Ostrom edition of Poe's Letters, Burton Pollin's Poe, Maker of Words, and early articles from Poe Studies: http://www.eapoe.org/geninfo/poegen.htm. See also:
52. The Fall of the House of Usher: Always interesting and entertaining with its graphics and audio, yet never without substance. Begun in early 1995 as a fan site, but still useful for students and general readers, with its strong elements of film and popular culture and extensive links to hard-to-find resources. Maintained by Peter Forrest: http://www.houseofusher.net. See also:
53. A Poe Webliography: Edgar Allan Poe on the Internet: A critical guide to electronic resources for Poe research on the World Wide Web and CD-ROM, including electronic texts, HTML-encoded texts, hypertexts, secondary works, commentaries, and indexes. Originally published in Poe Studies, 30 (1997) 1-20. Last updated July 2007, now largely superceded by the present article http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~ehrlich/poesites.html.
54. Edgar Allan Poe (Donna Campbell): An extensive classroom site for Poe, full of excellent resources for discussions and assignments. Includes other pages for American authors, timelines, movements, and 19th century views of Poe as part of a larger Web site for a course in nineteenth century American Literature: http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/poe.htm. See also: http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/sites.htm
55. Perspectives on American Literature (PAL): A Research and Reference Guide (Paul R. Reuben): A very useful teaching resource for Poe, with an extensive introduction to and overview of research and reference resources in American literature. The Poe materials include a selective critical bibliography, a short biography, Internet sites, a discussion of the rabies controversy, Poe's influence and themes, paradoxes in Poe, short story types, aesthetic theories, study questions, and examples of MLA citation style: http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/home.htm
56. Poe Studies: Dark Romanticism: The home page of Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism, published since 1968 at the Department of English, Washington State University, Alexander Hammond, editor, and Jana L. Argersinger, associate editor: http://libarts.wsu.edu/english/Journals/PoeStudies. The index to past issues is arranged alphabetically by author: http://libarts.wsu.edu/english/Journals/PoeStudies/past.html. Early Poe Studies articles (1968-79) are at the Poe Society of Baltimore: http://eapoe.org/pstudies.
57. The Edgar Allan Poe Review: The Poe Studies Association sponsors Poe-related sessions at the annual conferences of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the American Literature Association (ALA). In the Spring and Fall it publishes The Edgar Allan Poe Review (formerly the PSA Newsletter), edited by Barbara Cantalupo: http://www2.lv.psu.edu/PSA/. See also these archives:
58. Knowing Poe: This media-rich Baltimore-focused 2005 Webby award-winning site from Maryland Public Television has sections on Poe the writer, Poe the person, and the Poe library. Don't miss the video of members of the 2002-2003 Baltimore Ravens football team "interpreting" lines from "The Raven": http://knowingpoe.thinkport.org/default_flash.asp.
60. PoeStories: A garland of Poe stories and poems launched by Robert Giordano, a writer, photographer, and web designer, who writes: "During the summer of 2005, I decided to create a Poe web site that was informative, easy to navigate, and stylish." The elegant design and attractive introductory aids (summaries, quotes, and vocabulary glossary) conceal serious yet accessible materials that are useful for student projects: http://www.poestories.com/index.php.
59. Edgarallanpoe.de: A stunning multimedia and multilingual site, chiefly in German, by ECO Media, producer of a Poe documentary film, using creative techniques to bring out Poe's Gothicism. Take the time to download, install, and load the Flash version, and be sure to inspect all the program modules. "The Raven" is enriched with texts in English and French (the Stéphane Mallarmé translation), audio readings in English (two) and German (one), and a choice of three different sound effects for backgrounds. Instructional aids for readers of German include a glossary of Poe's English text. Peter Forrest served as an adviser: http://edgarallanpoe.de.
60. The Poe Decoder: Essays by Christoffer Nilson ("Qrisse's Poe Pages"), Martha Womack ("Precisely Poe"), David Grantz, and others (last updated in 2001): "We want to provide you with accurate facts on one of the greatest American writers ever, and once and for all put an end to all the lies and rumors that surround his person": http://www.poedecoder.com.
61. Ibiblio: This site from the University of North Carolina, calling itself "the public's library and digital archive" (formerly known as Sunsite and, before that, as Metalab), is now a main mirror for Project Gutenberg and contains 52 Edgar Allan Poe texts and useful links to other sites: http://www.ibiblio.org.
62. Medical Humanities: Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database: "The Literature, Arts, & Medicine Database is an annotated multimedia listing of prose, poetry, film, video and art that was developed to be a dynamic, accessible, comprehensive resource for teaching and research in Medical Humanities, and for use in health/pre-health, graduate and undergraduate liberal arts and social science settings." Discussions of medical aspects of "The Conqueror Worm," "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," "For Annie," "Hop-Frog," "The Imp of the Perverse," "The Masque of the Red Death," "Sonnet - to Science," "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Feather," and "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains." The site is now updated quarterly, and a blog was added in August 2007: http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/People?action=view&id=2265.
63. American Literature on the Web: Edgar Allan Poe: Akihito Ishikawa's site has many resources but was last updated in 2000: http://www.nagasaki-gaigo.ac.jp/ishikawa/amlit/p/poe19ro.htm. Click in the navigation frame on Poe.
64. Online-literature. Searchable Poe e-texts with a short biography and discussion forum: http://www.online-literature.com/poe/.
65. Poe and the Daguerreotype: The text of Poe's "The Daguerreotype" (Alexander's Weekly Magazine, Jan. 15, 1840): http://www.cis.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/poe.html. See also daguerreotype of Poe made in Lowell, MA, June 1840: http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=39406 and the discussions of it: http://www.getty.edu/education/for_teachers/curricula/portraits/portraits_lesson02.html.
66. Poe on Hawthorne: The Library of America text of three reviews by Poe: "Twice Told Tales," Graham's Magazine, April, 1842; "Twice Told Tales," Graham's Magazine, May, 1842; and "Tale-Writing" Godey's Lady's Book, Nov. 1847: http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/nhcrit.html.
67. Shawn Rosenheim: The Edgar Allan Poe Cryptographic Challenge: http://www.bokler.com/eapoe.html and Gil Broza's prize-winning solution (2000): http://www.bokler.com/eapoe_challengesolution.html.
Many would-be researchers start their efforts by using a search engine in order to find some tangible result quickly—without understanding either the capabilities or the limitations of the process. Search engines are ideal for locating something already known, such as the forgotten source of a phrase, but they are not suitable to sustain the burden of structured or disciplined research. Unlike printed bibliographies, which are carefully edited by experts, traditional Web search engines use cross-links from other Web pages to determine the rank order of matches. In practice, users often concentrate on the first screen or two of matches, ignoring literally millions of other matches. In using search engines, don't overlook the human-edited directories or the metasearch engines that amalgamate the results of several simultaneous searches. Because of the dominance of search traffic on the Web, search engines have taken on additional roles: Yahoo has become a portal to Web services and Google has become an archive of electronic books and scholarly bibliography.
Directories.
68. DMOZ: Open Directory Project: This directory, edited by volunteers, was initiated by Netscape using AOL Search—but is now powered by Google. It lists 79 sites devoted to Poe works, topics, and related subjects, with links to ten search engines: A9, AOL, Ask, Clusty, Gigablast, Google, Lycos, MSN, WiseNut, and Yahoo: http://www.dmoz.org/Arts/Literature/World_Literature/American/19th_Century/Poe,_Edgar_Allan/.
69. Yahoo's web directory can be accessed from its main page under "More." Searching "Edgar Allan Poe" yields 496 selected links: http://dir.yahoo.com.
70. Google's unpublicized directory promises 11,600 matches to a search for "Edgar Allan Poe." The "definition" promised is the encyclopedia entry at Answers.Com: http://directory.google.com.
Searching:
Web searching has become a sort of lingua franca of the Internet, and for this reason it is worth learning about what search engines can and cannot do.
71. Search Engine Watch: Provides "Search 101," an inside view of how various search engines and directories actually work, with usage statistics of a large number of search engines and news of the field: http://searchenginewatch.com. Visit a list of the top 500 search terms of the previous week, as updated regularly by Wordtracker: http://www.searchengineguide.com/wt/. Scroll down for the most recent week.
Google, including Books and Scholar:
72. The acceptance of google as a verb marks the acceptance of Google as the standard search engine. Google provides links to information on many subjects, unknown web addresses, and often a better way to find something on a local Web site than its own index. The current tally of results promised for "Edgar Allan Poe" is about 2,800,000, but your browser will not display more than ten screens of 100 matches each, a total of a mere one thousand matches. To see the other 2,799,000 results, you must use Boolean expressions to narrow the search request to something like "Edgar Allan Poe criticism" (1,546,000 matches), "Edgar Allan Poe postmodern criticism" (97,900 matches) or (using quotes for compound searches)"'Edgar Allan Poe' 'Charles Baudelaire' 'German criticism'" (6 matches). Google advanced services are worth exploring: the number of matches displayed may be increased to 100, and searches may be conducted within specific web sites. Google search responses may now include Web sites, books, and even items on your computer desktop: http://www.google.com. (AOL Search also uses the Google engine: http://search.aol.com.)
Don't overlook Google's related sites for other nations or languages, including:
A shelf of books has been written for programmers and hackers on how to exploit the Google engine. Google maintains Searchmash for testing its own ideas and services: http://www.searchmash.com, responding to "Edgar Allan Poe" with 1,670,000 text matches, and on demand, 144,000 images, 10,927 blogs, 2,870 wikis, and an unspecified number of videos. Google also maintains an experimental site where users are invited to discuss their search format preferences: http://www.google.com/experimental/.
73. Books.Google: Google entered an agreement with several universities—Cornell, Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, California, Michigan, Texas-Austin, Virginia, and Wisconsin-Madison—and the New York Public Library to scan millions of books and make the results available on the Internet, either without conditions for public domain material or under "fair use" for copyrighted material. Two opposing points of view emerged: some libraries and scholars applauded the development while some organizations representing publishers and writers brought suit to halt the practice. A search under Google Books for "Edgar Allan Poe" produces a "full view" of 6,172 books in the public domain and a "limited preview" of 12,053 books still under copyright. The searches may be further refined by title, author, publisher, or date of publication. However, there may be limitations on what may be viewed in these archived texts, and often the bibliographical descriptions are inadequate. Nevertheless, the matches, apparently displayed in random order, may yield sample passages, unusual vocabulary items, references, and a map of places mentioned. Desipte legal opposition, Google's collection of digitized books is becoming an increasingly useful archive for research, in both pubic domain and copyrighted materials: http://books.google.com/books?q=Edgar+Allan+Poe. (See also Amazon and A9, below.)
74. Scholar.Google: Links to 19,000 scholarly articles on Poe on the Internet. The option "Recent Articles" (in the last five years) reduces the number of matches to 3,250. The links provide primarily bibliographical information and seem to be displayed in no obvious order: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Edgar+Allan+Poe. Although Scholar does not claim to be comprehensive, one study suggests that its coverage is rather small (see below).
75. Yahoo! The Yahoo home Web page has become visually complex: for an explanation, click on "About." The useful Yahoo! Directory page is concealed beneath the "More" option. The request for "Edgar Allan Poe" brings up subtopic suggestions, such as poems, biography, and "The Raven." The Yahoo! Shortcut at the top of the page links to a Columbia Encyclopedia article. Although the search for "Edgar Allan Poe" promises 5.8 million matches, the counter is limited to 20 pages of 50 matches each, or one thousand matches, the rank numbers of which should not be taken as absolute. The Advanced Search supports the quest for a word or phrase in a particular Web site: http://www.yahoo.com. See also Yahoo's useful search services and tools:
http://tools.search.yahoo.com/about/forsearchers.html. (Yahoo! has acquired and incorporated All the Web http://www.alltheweb.com and Altavista http://www.altavista.com.)
76. Search.Live.Com: A search in Microsoft Live for "Edgar Allan Poe" produces 3,910,000 claimed results, of which about 1,200 can be seen. The results are displayed in pleasant colors and large type, with advertisements the top and related searches and sponsored sites at the right. Live Search has two beta capabilities, both found under the "More" heading: Academic Beta yields 918 Poe matches to journal articles and abstracts, some with links to full text versionsm with bibliographic descriptors available in the BibTeX, RefWorks, or Endnote format. In addition, Books Beta promises 4,580 Poe matches, which will be 10%, 20%, or 100% viewable, depending on publisher agreements. Participation requires a sign-in with a Hotmail, MSN e-mail, MCN Messenger or Microsoft Passport account. In keeping with Microsoft's emphasis on visual information, mousing over list items on the left brings up physical page images on the right: http://search.live.com. (The Microsoft Live search engine is also used at the Amazon A9 site: see below.)
Amazon and A9:
77. Amazon's A9 site combines network searching, access to Amazon's book page, and Open Search. A9 uses Microsoft Live Search to return 3,520,000 Web matches on "Edgar Allan Poe," 260 of which could be retrieved by persistent scrolling, and it also promises 20,085 book matches on Amazon, of which 1,000 could be retrieved in the same manner. Most of these many books are not by or about Poe, but each one that I tested contained at least his name. The most recent mission of A9 (apart from being a portal to the Amazon site, discussed below) is as the focus for OpenSearch, which can aggregate the contents of up to 614 other Web sources from a menu (including Answer.Com, Live News, and Wikipedia): http://www.a9.com.
The most interesting feature of the Amazon site is the astonishing Search Inside the Book feature, which dramatically demonstrates the possibilities of the computer in producing indexes, concordances, and text analysis. For each work covered by SITB, Amazon provides a concordance of the hundred commonest words and lists of its statistically improbable phrases (SIPs), its capitalized phrases (CAPs), and books on related topics. The reader can browse the front cover, copyright page, table of contents, and the index. More usefully, the scholar can search the entire text to create an on-demand concordance of desired words, which will be shown in their immediate context with page references, making it possible to search the vocabulary of a given text very rapidly. Amazon has also integrated its database of works covered by the Search Inside the Text feature so that a general search for "transcendentalism" yields 6,432 books containing the word (displaying text samples from SITB-enhanced works), while a search for "Edgar Allan Poe and transcendentalism" focuses on 46 books by or about him containing the words, displaying examples with page citations where possible. Through its contracts with book publishers, Amazon has been able to offer controlled portions of many texts of great value to Poe scholars (including many still in copyright), such as the editions of T. O. Mabbott and the Library of America; standard biographies by A. H. Quinn and Kenneth Silverman; and recent criticism by (or collected by) Kevin J. Hayes, J. Gerald Kennedy, and Terrence Whalen. To browse these texts using the Search Inside the Book feature, issue a compound request in Amazon with the names of "Poe" and the editor or critic, as described above. If extended, the remarkable SITB feature in Amazon promises to do for research in books a little of what Project Muse and Jstor do for journal articles.
Google offers some texts for browsing not available on Amazon, although there is unavoidable overlap between the two. Nevertheless, at the time of writing, some essential works, such as Burton Pollin's edition of the Collected Writings (Gordian), The Poe Log by Dwight Thomas and D. K. Jackson (G. K. Hall), Eric Carlson's Companion to Poe Studies (Greenwood), and G. R. Thompson's edition of the Norton Critical Poe, are apparently not available in any electronic form on the Internet.
78. Ask.Com: Some librarians prefer the natural language interface of Ask to that of other search engines. Typing the query "Edgar Allan Poe" will produce several Search Suggestions: poems, biography, poetry, quotes, stories, early life, timeline, life, and poems. The search results appear on a three-part screen: on the left, Related Topics (to narrow or expand your search) and Related Names; in the center, the actual search results; and on the right, panels for Images, Video, and News. The query "Edgar Allan Poe criticism" yields the suggestion "Literary Criticism on Edgar Allan Poe," which, if accepted, leads to useful web sites, such as the Internet Public Library, the College and Research Library News, and the Library of Congress. On the other hand, More Subcategories suggests "What Do Critics Say about Edgar Allan Poe," which leads in turn to "Research Papers" (a mixture of respectable sites and term paper mills) and "Free Essays." When sponsored advertisements appear at the top and bottom of pages, they persist on the screen despite scrolling.: http://www.ask.com. See also the AskX experimental interface: http://www.AskX.com. (Ask provides the search engine for Lycos: http://www.lycos.com.)
Metasearching:
Metasearch engines examine several search engines simultaneously.
79. Dogpile: Despite the questionable name, Dogpile is a useful metasearch engine that collates results from Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live Search, Ask, and other search engines: http://www.dogpile.com. The search for "Edgar Allan Poe" produces 36 highly selective matches with suggestions for subtopics auch as criticism. (Incidentally, J. D. Power ranked Dogpile highest among the Web search engines it rated: http://www.jdpower.com/util/ratings/ratings.aspx?study_id=532&vertical=Telecom.)
80. Clusty: http://www.clusty.com. This surprisingly structured metasearch engine responds to a request for "Edgar Allan Poe" with 218 results, usefully divided into 37 subject clusters, identifying their sources and their site types, which may be pursued by subdivisions.
81. Grokker: http://www.grokker.com. This visual search engine gathers "Edgar Allan Poe" data from Yahoo!, Wikipedia, and Amazon and presents it as 250 topics in an outline view featuring graphical previews that can be made to collapse or expand,
82. Poe Museum (Richmond): The Poe Museum in Richmond, VA, is a valuable source of interesting information on Poe. The address is The Poe Foundation, 1914-16 East Main Street, Richmond, VA 23223. For tour information, call (804) 648-5523 or 1-888-21E-APOE: http://www.poemuseum.org.
83. Poe National Historic Site (Philadelphia): This is the house Poe lived in from fall of 1842 (or June of 1843) to April of 1844. Administered through Independence National Historic Park, 313 Walnut St., Philadelphia, PA 19106. For tour information, call (215) 597-8780: http://www.nps.gov/edal/index1.html.
84. Poe Cottage, Bronx, New York: Poe lived in this house in Fordham in the Bronx during the last years of his life. His wife, Virginia, died here in 1847. The Poe cottage is in Poe Park, Grand Concourse and East Kingsbridge Road, Bronx, New York. The Poe Cottage is maintained by The Bronx County Historical Society, 3266 Bainbridge Avenue, Bronx, NY 10467. For tour information, call (212) 881-8900: http://www.bronxhistoricalsociety.org/about/poecottage.html.
85. The Raven Society of the University of Virginia: As a student honor society, the Raven Society does not accept members from outside the University community. They do, however, sponsor a number of public events in the Charlottesville, Virginia area and help to maintain the room in which Poe stayed while he was the University of Virginia. The Raven Society, Box 412 Newcomb Hall Station, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, E-Mail: ravens@virginia.edu: http://scs.student.virginia.edu/~ravens/.
86. University of Virginia Sesquicentennial Poe Memorial: An online version of the 1999 exhibit, with links to the Valentine Museum, the Richmond Poe Museum, Poe's letters, and 30 older Poe e-texts.: http://etext.virginia.edu/poe/.
The Deep Web
How much of the Web do the major search engines actually cover? Pages that are open, linked, and static can be searched and indexed without difficulty, but pages that are behind proprietary firewalls, left unlinked for reasons of privacy, or created dynamically upon request cannot be detected by standard search engines. Such pages constitute the Deep Web (or Hidden Web), the extent of which cannot be estimated with any accuracy.
87. Although its findings may not be representative, a study by the University of California-Berkeley concludes that Google Scholar represents only 10% of the items in its library's journals: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/teachingLib/Guides/Internet/InvisibleWeb.html. See also Robert J. Lackie's "Those Dark Hiding Places: The Invisible Web Revealed": http://www.robertlackie.com/invisible/index.html, and, for a survey of the Deep Web, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web.
Web 2.0
During the 1990s, the first decade of the Web, standardized PC-compatible hardware combined with standardizes Microsoft software—Windows, Word, and Internet Explorer. In this era Yahoo! became the first dominant search engine by using computer algorithms to analyze and classify the contents of Web documents. In this first decade of the Web, online research was defined by the authoritarian structure of the document network, one-way, top-down, and read-only. By contrast, immediately afterwards, in the first decade after 2000, new two-way, bottom-up, read-write forms of the Web began to appear with strange blogs, wikis, and mash-ups, resulting in a movement that came to be known in 2004 as Web 2.0.
The Interactive and Social Web
The dominant Web search engine after 2000 was Google, which evaluated how the authors of Web pages linked them to other Web pages, replacing analytic computer algorithms with the pragmatic tagging by small human communities. The new rank order for pages was no longer determined by computer analysis but rather by peer evaluation. Amazon similarly personalized responses to queries by prospective online book buyers by tapping into its huge database of the browsing and buying habits of previous customers. While Amazon already knew who its online customers were, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo identified their users by recruiting them with free email and related network services. When new forms of social software appeared, it transformed the formerly static news postings, such as those of the old Usenet, into the new open Web logs (blogs) and pages of multiple authorship (wikis). The new social networks Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube began to dominate Web traffic, and Wikipedia aspired to become the Encyclopedia Britannica of Web 2.0. The focus of personal computing shifted further from the desktop to the network as high school and college students took up the new discourse techniques by joining communities of text messaging, blogging, and webcam activity. But the movement was not limited to student culture: a new thread of academic and technological discourse arose among academic librarians and information literacy theorists (look for their weighty discussions of "Web 2.0" and "online research" in the subscription bibliographic databases). If there is a new "digital divide" here it may not be one of access to technology by social and economic class but rather of generations, the gap between those who spent their transformative college years experiencing the original Internet and Web and those who grow up with the new Web 2.0. Two surprising results of Web 2.0 are the emergence of crowdsourcing (seen in the correct answers voted by studio audiences of TV quiz programs) and folksonomy, a loose, multi-associative form of grouping that challenges traditional structured taxonomy.
The Google Network v. the Microsoft Desktop
Google constantly learns from the behavior patterns of its users: when I type just "Edgar" in the search box of my usual computer, the engine immediately guesses that I mean "Edgar Allan Poe" and suggests several sub-topics. The Google interface is a continually evolving one, always testing ways to integrate book, image, and video results into traditional text searches.
88. Google software. Google's strategy to shift the focus of personal computing as far as possible from Microsoft's desktop to its own network includes its offer of a family of free software products for download from its network: see http://pack.google.com. One essential item for scholars, Google Desktop, indexes everything on your hard disk, creating a local database that it can integrate with a history of past Web visits when it displays the results of a current Web search: http://desktop.google.com. For word processing projects, Google Docs puts files on the network for access from office, home, or while traveling, making it possible to share work with collaborators, editors, and colleagues: http://docs.google.com. See a survey of Google's products and projects of interest: http://labs.google.com.
89. Poe scholars curious about Web 2.0 can begin a tour in the main entry on Poe in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe. Scroll down for links to other Poe pages on Wikipedia. There is also a shorter Wikipedia page on Poe at http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe. Other wiki-based pages elsewhere are surveyed by Qwika, which gathers 1,194 matches for "Edgar Allan Poe":
http://www.qwika.com/find/edgar_allan%20poe. The Wikipedia software also spawned the related Wikia site, which contains 169 user-contributed mentions of Poe: http://www.wikia.com. Feeling hyper-liberated, the contributors to Wikia came up with idea of a parody of the parent Wikipedia site, producing the "uncyclopedia," which includes a remarkable travesty of its own Poe page at http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe.
90. Groups and listservs: The largest collection of Poe discussion groups, at groups.yahoo.com, contains 91 mentioning Poe. Although access to the Poe listserv at L-PSAMEN@LISTS.PSU.EDU is limited to members of the Poe Studies Association, an open discussion board for Poe topics is at http://users.boardnation.com/~poeforum/index.php?board=1.
91. The blogosphere. The Technorati directory of this domain reports 915 blogs mentioning Poe: http://www.technorati.com. To create your own blog, visit http://www.blogger.com, where, after you log into (or create) your Google account, you name the blog, choose the template, and proceed. See, for example, my blog for Poe Web sites at http://poesites.blogspot.com/.
92. Shared bookmarks: The improbably named Del.icio.us site is promising for Poe scholars who need to organize, store and share their bookmarks or, potentially, discover the names of other scholars with similar research interests through their Web page bookmarks. There are 751 postings of Poe-tagged bookmarks, annotated with searchable, non-hierarchical, non-exclusive associations: http://del.icio.us.
93. Mash-ups: These recombinations of data from existing Web sources have been used in several Poe studies. One study of downloads on the previous day from the ibiblio.org mirror of Project Gutenberg revealed that among the top 100 literary requests "The Raven" was 25th, just ahead of Joyce's Ulysses, and that among all authors Poe stood in 12th place. In its analysis of search traffic Wordsfinder estimated that there were 199,487 U. S. Web searches one month for "Edgar Allan Poe," divided among Google (124,870), Yahoo (45,684), MSN (21,319), and Ask (7,614). In 2007 SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)—developed by ARL (Association of Research Libraries)—sponsored a "MindMashup" videotape contest "to promote the open exchange of information": http://sparkyawards.org. (The main SPARC page is at http://www./arl.org/sparc/.) For software to facilitate user-made mashups that regard can take the entire Web as material ready to be re-combined, see Yahoo Pipes: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipes.popular. For Poe scholars, a promising resource is Earth.Google, itself a mashup of satellite, aerial, and global positioning information at http://earth.google.com, ready for shared annotatation with Poe's known addresses in Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia.
94. Sites that recommend sites: As part of its bottom-up approach, several Web 2.0 directories depend on contributions by users. See the 11 recommendations for Poe sites uploaded to http://www.stumbleupon.com and the endorsements of 38 Poe-related newsworthy items at http://www.digg.com.
95. Your own wiki: To start you own wiki in less than a minute, even if you have no special skills, visit PBWiki (peanut butter wiki) at http://www.pbwiki.com. See also the academic support at http://pbwiki.com/education.wiki. A Google search of PBWiki and Edgar Allan Poe produces 733 hits.
96. Your secret self: The courageous can join a community of residents in an imaginary 3D digital online virtual world: http://secondlife.com.
Humanities 2.0
The pragmatic argument for Web 2.0 is that scholars, critics, and librarians can use its technologies to better engage the contemporary college student, the reverse side of which is that such professionals need to understand and thus to protect themselves from the impact of the new technologies of social networking on students in their research projects and papers. Although the full impact of Web 2.0 upon scholarly research and teaching may not be clear for some time, Cathy N. Davidson, former president of the American Studies Association, has taken the lead in arguing its case in a series of articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education; furthermore, in her article, "Humanities 2.0," in PMLA she makes Web 2.0 the model in he call for a "networked, interactive, collaborative Humanities 2.0" [1].
By 2006, just two years after Tim O'Reilly first promoted Web 2.0 as a subject for contemporary conferences and magazine articles, speculation began over what the next form of the Internet might be—already dubbed Web 3.0. There is agreement in theory that Web 3.0 will be a semantic web, readable by both machines and people. Then nearly everyone will have a Web page that can be read on cell phones and other devices, and computer users will also be developers of their own databases and software.
The Semantic Web:
97. GGG: Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, is credited with having originated the term "the semantic web" in a Scientific American article in 2001 [2]. He since stated that he would rather that it be called "the data web," and has also proposed, perhaps half-seriously, that Web 3.0 be called GGG for Giant Global Graph: the first Internet linked computers; the current Web links documents; and the future Graph, or semantic web, will link relationships between people and documents—not the mere texts but "the things documents are about": http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/215. For background on Web 3.0, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0.
98. Applications of The Semantic Web:
Cade Metz reminds us in PC Magazine that a semantic web agent could peform the task of "researching a term paper." [3] Whether or not this is desirable, how is it possible? How would the semantic web work? There seems general agreement at present that it would reject the top-down route of artificial intelligence (AI) that uses logical programming and structured algorithms. Instead,it would probably begin with bottom-up enhancement of existing data through extensive markup. At present, tagging systems are the heart of social networking Web sites such as Del.icio.us, Digg, Myspace, and Flickr, but these separate tagging systems are incompatible and therefore cannot communicate with each other. [3] The semantic web might depend on metadata, that is to say, markup that makes data more intelligible to computers so that they can cooperate with each other. Existing XML tags that provide labels for data fields (such as author, title, publisher, and date) would be enhanced with RDF (Resource Description Framework) to describe the functions of each different type of data and how it relates to other types. (People already know how they connect but computers need to be told.) There's an application of the semantic web in the timeline presented on the Web site of Harper's Magazine, which can display and tally by year of publication every subject mentioned in its pages since 1850, when it began publication: thus, we can see any of the 170 mentions there of Poe for any year, decade, or other time span, such as that 62 mentions of him appeared there during the 19th century: http://www.harpers.org.
Epilogue:
Does Web 2.0 provide additions to existing knowledge or entirely new kinds of knowledge? Does it contribute to existing studies or will it require different studies in the future? As libraries are forced for economic reasons to replace their runs of printed journals with subscriptions to packages of digitized journals, professors and students alike are changing their research habits. Yet teachers will have an unexpected burden: the easier searching becomes the harder teaching research will be. Even though those two cultures, the old culture of research and the new culture of searching, seem to be growing further apart, that need not be a new problem for Poe scholars, long accustomed to dealing with the disconnect between his dual significance for the avant garde and popular culture. The title poem in the improbably entitled posthumous collection of writings of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79), Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box (Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2006) explores lust in a cheap bar: "Poe said that poetry was exact / But pleasures are mechanical / and know beforehand what they want ...." Whether or not Poe ever said such a thing, and whatever this view of pleasure signifies, we can at least agree that the future, whatever it holds, will not be like the past. Even The New York Times, one of the stateliest monuments of print culture, has taken the seismic plunge into the future of media, transforming its famous slogan, "All the News That's Fit to Print," first reformatting it in a cloud of lower case, variably-sized, irregularly stacked type and then retexting it as "All the news that's fit to print. stream. archive. digitize. e-mail. personalize. broadcast. blog. feed. debate. click. nytimes.com" [5]. As was the case for Poe and his readers of "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade," such an advertising claim will seem exaggerated only to the uninformed.
Notes:
[1] In "The Changing Profession," PMLA [forthcoming]
[2] Tim Berners-Lee, et al, "The Semantic Web," Scientific American 284:5, pp. 34-43 (17 May 2001).
[3] Cade Metz, "The Internet is Changing ... Again," PC Magazine, 26:7/8, 10 April 2007)
[4] Lee Feigenbaum, et al, "The Semantic Web in Action," Scientific American 297:6 (December 2007).
[5] New York Times, 7 November 2007, F9, and passim.