Poe in Cyberspace: A Twentieth Birthday Party

In the spring of 1998 an item awkwardly titled "Electronic Poe News, #1" appeared in the PSA Newsletter. It quickly became "Poe in Cyberspace" in what is now the Edgar Allan Poe Review. Today, in the spring of 2018, we can celebrate its twentieth anniversary by considering some memorable moments of Poe's cyber past, present, and future.

From our vantage point of today, the internet of 1998 seems almost unrecognizable. One-third of the U.S. population still used telephone dial-ups to get on the internet, and while some users benefited from a high-frequency DSL line, others once plugged their telephone handset directly into a three-hundred-baud modem to get an acoustical connection. On the early internet, it often was necessary to type memorized Telnet and FTP instructions into the Unix command line, before Archie provided a menu of sorts and Gopher offered an index. Although the internet had been created by the Department of Defense as ARPANET in the 1960s, its wide acceptance awaited Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web and hypertext encoding (HTML) circa 1990. Then any PC or Mac could get on the internet, launch the Netscape browser, use the AltaVista search engine, or visit the Yahoo! all-purpose web portal.

Even though Michael Hart had begun Project Gutenberg in 1970, and the Oxford Text Archive started operations in 1976, early Poe materials for research on the internet were scarce. Usually they had to be retyped or scanned by volunteers from whatever printed material was at hand. Judy Boss of the University of Omaha is credited with creating the first Poe etexts in 1992, using the Dent edition (London 1908) and uploading a group to Tom Almy's Bitter Butter Better bulletin board system (BBBBBS). After removing the pagination, Almy forwarded the thirteen Poe tales to Internet Wiretap, from which they were copied to the prestigious Oxford Text Archive and eventually to the Tact CD-ROM, which was published with the imprimatur of the MLA. However, there was something unscholarly about these etexts. In 1993, Kelley Teterton at the University of Virginia, realizing the need for page numbers, had added pagination from the respected Harrison edition—but only the page numbers of these etexts were reliably Harrison's. Teterton soon realized the difficulty, restored the correct original pagination with credit to the Dent edition, but by then these faux Harrison texts had already circulated freely to other academic sites on the internet.

Oddly, there was a second family of early Poe etexts with a better genealogy but with less extensive circulation. Apparently based on the Borzoi Poe edition, these etexts were published in the Library of the Future CD-ROM, third edition, and then migrated to the Virginia Tech Eris collection and a few other sites. Unfortunately, the fine early CD-ROM published in 1990 by WordCruncher from Library of America editions did not include anything by Poe.

Poe scholars may have first become aware of the research possibilities of the internet by encountering the pioneering survey of literary material "Alex: A Catalogue of Electronic Texts on the Internet," issued by Hunter Monroe in July 1994 and later maintained by Eric Lease Morgan (it's still available at http://infomotions.com/alex/). Early Poe etexts appeared on several other internet sites, including, in addition to those previously mentioned, CCAT (Penn), the English Server (Carnegie Mellon), OBI: The Online Book Initiative at ftp.std. com (not to be confused with the Online Book Page, begun at Carnegie Mellon in 1993 but moved to Penn in 1999), Project Bartleby, and Project Gutenberg. In September 1994, in my first webpage for my academic department, I inserted this partisan pronouncement: "It contains no graphics, no images, no audio, no video, no tactile or olfactory thrills. Just plain text." Needless to say, early plain-text browsers, such as Lynx, quickly gave way to graphical browsers, such as Mosaic, later Netscape, and eventually Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Within a few years, there were more than a hundred websites displaying Poe material, warranting my issue of A Poe Webliography, which was published in...