The Perseus Garner: Early Modern Resources in the Digital Age

This paper describes the Perseus Garner, an experiment in encoding and displaying the dense interlinkage among primary and secondary texts of interest to students and scholars of the Early Modern period. Because these texts co-exist in an integrated digital library, readers can exploit a suite of tools to discover new relationships and ask new questions. Perseus’s dense interlinking does more than make connections explicit, however: it foregrounds them in a way that is troubling to those who worry that disturbing the traditional hierarchy of primary sources and secondary commentary will draw readers away from close contact with literature. Despite its shortcomings, the Perseus Garner suggests an aim for this research: a hypervariorum whose mode of conceptualizing and rendering the relationship of text and annotation challenges the traditional model of “perpetual commentary” and promises to denature synthetic criticism into a full, turbid stream of scholarly discovery and critical opinion.