So much here! I'm floored! Congratulations! Starting my 'to do' list now
. . .
This is fantastic, Roxana,
Margaret
On 10/30/2014 3:47 PM, Roxana Preda wrote:
> Dear Poundians,
>
> I am very happy to announce that on Ezra's birthday this year, The
> Cantos Project is officially launched. The platform now is fully
> operational and awaits our scholarly input.
>
> Please have a look at http://www.thecantosproject.org.
>
> A few words about it:
>
> TCP is a website that aims to fulfil a dream that scholars have had
> since 1986: to have a second edition of Terrell's Companion - at best
> in electronic form so errors can be corrected and information added on
> a continuous basis without overwhelming the poem or the student.
> Though attempts have been made along the years (we all still remember
> Kybernekia) technology was not coping with our needs, nor were we
> coping with what technology demanded.
>
> My position is that we are now ready. We can do it with the platform I
> am proposing. (Which I dearly hope you will like).
>
> When I presented the project at the EPIC conference in Dublin last
> year, Alec Marsh, the society's former president, generously offered
> me the sponsorship I needed for it. In his vision, the Cantos Project
> was to be located at the heart of the scholarly activity of the
> society; it could be THE way for us to work together so as to bring
> the annotation of The Cantos up to speed.
>
> There are almost 30 years of scholarship not included in Terrell's
> Companion.
>
> New Directions allows us to present six cantos on the website at any
> one time. This is why TCP cannot be a digital edition of the poem,
> however much we may regret this fact. (As an aside, Robert Spoo
> remarked that we can apply Pound's economics to TCP: if your money is
> scarce you can increase the velocity of circulation. Six cantos can
> seem a lot, when the rhythm of publishing and hiding them is quick. I
> found this a wonderful idea. Once the Cantos are annotated they can be
> hidden and republished as often and as fast as we need.)
>
> TCP can be our building site. We can make it our scholars' resource,
> our aid in research and teaching. Even at square one, as you will see
> when you look at it, the bibliographies are in place throughout the
> poem, at homepage and cycle page levels. A student, say, who wants to
> see relevant books or articles about a section of The Cantos or even
> individual poems can use TCP even now. The book bibliography is
> complete, as far as I know. The journal articles biblio is very
> comprehensive and will continuously be updated. What I still have to
> put in are chapters and book sections - but I will do that in the next
> six months. What we want is to make TCP our ultimate reference, the
> place to go. The scholarly apparatus is OURS and remains so.
>
> What we can do: we can initiate a work stream whereby six cantos are
> "live" at any given time. This means they will be online and the
> annotation will be under construction. You don't need to be a
> technological wizard to contribute: if working conventionally is
> easier, that is possible - just drop me an email to discuss what suits
> you best. When annotation is finished, the glosses will be transferred
> to an online illustrated Companion, which will be a downloadable pdf,
> one for every canto. Then the cantos will be "unpublished" to make
> space for the next ones. This means that they are not deleted and the
> annotation is not taken away from them. They are just hidden from view.
>
> I have uploaded six cantos on the site, from Ur-Canto I to Canto III.
> Canto I is minimally annotated so you can see an example. In order to
> preserve the integrity of the text and not spoil the magic, the
> annotation is hidden. By hovering with your mouse over an underlined
> word, you will bring up an electronic card with the gloss. Move the
> mouse away and the card disappears.
> The system offers us the possibility of having longer glosses as well,
> which we can add by the "create article" function.
> See the guidelines for contributors on the site.
>
> Terrell's Companion bears his name on the cover yet The Companion
> would not have been possible without his friends and collaborators.
> Hugh Kenner, Eva Hesse, Robert Gordon, to mention just the best-known
> names, contributed massively to all aspects of its creation. Terrell
> also used the accumulated knowledge stored in Paideuma. But he had
> seven years of Paideuma behind him when he started. We now have forty
> years.
>
> It is time we begin.
>
> Happy birthday Ezra.
>
>
>
>
>
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