Thresholds and their Occupants:
Passages in Hypermedia and the Literary Avant-garde
Heather M. Crickenberger
1 Introduction, Overview, and Rationale: Briefly describe the ebook or scholarly project—no more than two single-spaced pages.
The Arcades Project Project exists currently as a living, online scholarly hypertext. It was begun in 2003 as an experiment in the use of hypermedia as a primary means of both enacting and sharing scholarly research. Its awkward title was intended, first off, to anchor the project to a stable text that has been deemed a valid subject of study in the academic realm of the humanities where books are still the preferred end products of scholarly investigation. I also chose to work with The Arcades Project because, as much of the project reflects, Benjamin’s writings in many ways anticipate the medium that we now call hypertext through his deployment of a file-based compositional structure, his extended use of quotation, his development of a means of linking a text to itself through the use of visual cues or “blinks,” and his incorporation of images (though few have survived to be included in either edition). Benjamin was aware even before the web became a reality that media of communication were undergoing an enormous transformation in the twentieth century and that this fact alone would alter not only the way scholarship is disseminated but the form and purpose of scholarship as a whole. In forging The Arcades Project, Benjamin in many ways seemed to be at work as his own “Author as Producer”—modifying the apparatus of perception—going to work as the “aesthetic engineer”—creating literary forms that could not have been dreamed up without advances in film-making, montage and advertisement that backgrounded the post-war street scene...link
in the catalog