by Martha Tancock
Trent Communications

Zailig Pollock

When English literature professor Zailig Pollock and his colleague Sandra Djwa of Simon Fraser University are finished, E.J. Pratt scholars and librarians will bless them. Their hypertext edition of the late Canadian poet's work will feature every version of every poem he ever wrote and links to scanned-in images of every page of every version. All instantly accessible at a single site on the World Wide Web. A virtual Pratt archive.

        Called The Complete Poems of E.J. Pratt: A Hypertext Edition, it will ultimately include more than 200 poems, be fully annotated and feature a critical introduction. But it will never really be complete, says Pollock. After he and Djwa complete the three-year project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council next year, there will "always be stuff to add." Unlike a book, an electronic edition can and, in this case, will be updated and changed, though not necessarily by Pollock. "The nature of this project is that it will never end."

         It will be a scholar's dream and heralds what could become a trend in academic publishing. It will save researchers the trouble of travelling to different libraries, waiting for interlibrary loans, wading through multiple texts. All they have to do is plant themselves in front of a computer, enter an address (currently http://www.trentu.ca/pratt) and voilą. Everything they need.

        "Librarians are excited" over the project, says Pollock, who scanned or transcribed by hand most of the manuscript material from Victoria University Library in Toronto. "The library thinks it's great because it will publicize their holdings and reduce some of the demand on the Pratt collection."

        If the completed Pratt site were printed, it would be a massive 100,000 pages long and weigh a tonne. "It includes a huge amount of information that couldn't be presented in any other way," says Pollock. He is responsible for the hypertext structure and textual editing; Djwa, for the introduction; both, for annotations. The site will also feature a detailed timeline and hundreds of photographs. "It's like a huge, well organized scrapbook." This electronic version weighs nothing, costs nothing, occupies no space and can incorporate anything and everything. Scholars can examine the most arcane details, recreational readers can ignore them.

        However, "if you think it's going to be a substitute for books, you're crazy," says Pollock. "No one's going to read Pratt's poems that way. They'll want a book so they won't be distracted by the links. I see this project as supplementary to printed editions. I don't see the book disappearing . . . . I see this as a scholarly resource."

        Discussions are underway with University of Toronto Press to publish a print version, to be keyed to the hypertext edition. It will contain a single version of each poem, an introduction, glossary and no textual notes. The hypertext edition of the poems will eventually be linked to a hypertext edition of Pratt's letters, currently being edited by Trent English literature professor Elizabeth Popham and Memorial University professor emeritus David Pitt.

        Pollock has been seduced by the unlimited possibilities of electronic publishing. The constraints of print publishing are still fresh in his memory after editing the two-volume Complete Poems of A.M. Klein. "Although I was happy with the edition, I resolved never to do a print edition again. There were too many things I wanted to do as an editor which you can't do in print, such as including all versions of a poem or images of the original so that users of the edition can judge the accuracy of your readings for themselves. An electronic edition is a way of democratizing research."