Poe in Cyberspace: Have Poe Websites Become an Endangered Species?

Abstract

Whenever I surf the Internet to check up on my favorite Poe websites, I hold my breath a little. How many of my old Internet friends will still be there? Looking back from our current moment of unprecedented computer hardware evolution and burgeoning social media, we can easily be shocked to discover that favorite Poe websites have fallen by the wayside, frozen without updating, or gone without a forwarding address. However, it can be both heartening and reassuring when an interesting new Poe website joins the galaxy—but more of that in a moment.Specialist Poe sites have been with us for about twenty years. Electronic texts themselves are almost as old as the Internet. Soon after the original ARPANET Internet stimulus of the late 1960s, Michael Hart, who later founded Project Gutenberg, created the first electronic text when he typed the U.S. Declaration of Independence into his computer at the University of Illinois in 1971. The earliest known Poe etexts were typed in by Judy Boss for posting to Tom Almy's Bitter Butter Better bulletin board system (BBBBBS). Other early Poe etexts prepared by the Online Book Initiative appeared on Internet Wiretap, and the Oxford Text Archive (OTA) rescued for reuse more than a dozen Poe etexts. In those bracing early days, raw Telnet and FTP commands, often committed to memory, had to be typed in at the Unix command line. Only later did menu systems appear under such suggestive names such as Gopher, Archie, and Veronica. Meanwhile, other early Poe etexts appeared on CD-ROM on the Library of the Future and on Core1 World's Greatest Classic Books.The modern Web dates from Tim Berners-Lee's introduction of HTML (hypertext markup language) in the early 1990s, which magically transformed the original hard-to-use Internet into the convenient World Wide Web, making it universally compatible and relatively easy to produce, rapidly linking up sites to one another. For literary texts, in 1994 Eric Lease Morgan's release of the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts at http://infomotions.com/alex/ was an important advance as perhaps the first list of a fairly complete set of 112 unformatted Poe works online, then available in the Virginia Tech Eris Collection. Incidentally, the printed source of this etext set seems to have been the Borzoi Poe (The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, New York: Knopf, 1946, ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn and E. H. O'Neill).The first website specifically dedicated to Poe was Peter Forrest's The House of Usher, at http://houseofusher.net/, launched in 1995; at one time it was also available in French. PoeDecoder, at http://poedecoder.com/, followed in 1997; my own survey, A Poe Webliography, at http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~ehrlich/poesites.html, appeared soon after; and this column began the following year. Regrettably, the life span of pioneer Poe sites on the Web was often short; after eleven years The House of Usher was frozen in 2006. PoeDecoder enjoyed updates until 2001; its offshoot, PreciselyPoe, at http://www.poedecoder.com/PreciselyPoe/, kept going until 2006; and the page maintained by founder Christoffer Hallqvist, at http://www.poedecoder.com/Qrisse/, seemed quiet until it was refreshed by a blog in 2012. (Disclosure: I froze my own Poe Webliography in 2010 when a majority of the links pointed to sites that were no longer available.)What is worse than suspended animation, of course, is the sadder fate of those dedicated Poe sites that went dark entirely, such as Stefan Gmoser's page, The Poe Perplex, and Poe Central. In addition, some general purpose websites with memorable Poe content also vanished, including Intute (originally Humbul), a highly selective academic site that closed in 2011, and the once indispensable bibliography of the SSSL (Society for the Study of Southern Literature), which closed in 2010.By 2010 the freezing or disappearance of so many Poe websites reflected the fact that the nature of the Web was changing. In the beginning, etexts had to be keyed in by hand; later they could be scanned as images and rendered mechanically into texts by means of OCR (optical character recognition). Later, some PDF archives were able to synchronize their accurate page images on the screen with searchable etexts hidden beneath. At first, tags for HTML formatting were concerned mainly with structure: the codes initially left the determination of the typeface and text size to the computer hardware, the browser in use, and user preference.As Web pages became more visual, HTML added graphical and media elements, adopting CSS (cascading style sheets), which made it possible to change what was seen on the screen without changing the contents of the text. After 2004 the continuing evolution of the dynamic and extensible forms known as DHTML, XHTL, and XML had added so many interactive functions to the original simple forms of the Web that it was necessary to invent a label for the new state of things—namely, Web 2.0. In the future semantic Web, we are told, texts will be equally intelligible to people and machines. In the latest HTML5 version, new tags (shown in angle brackets) were added for semantic elements, such as <main>, <section>, <article>, <header>, <footer>, <aside>, <nav>, and <figure>, as well as media descriptors for <audio> and <video>.More recently, as tablets, smartphones, and ereaders have begun to rival desktops and laptops as the personal hardware of general choice, and, increasingly, as social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs have become more widely used to express popular interest and personal chat, the traditional authority of professional knowledge on expert Web pages has come under challenge. The importance of Facebook, for example, is not mainly in the code written by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg but rather in the content of social conversations among its 1.5 billion participants. For those interested in statistics, on Facebook the largest Poe page, EdgarAllanPoeAuthor, at https://www.facebook.com/EdgarAllanPoeAuthor, has 3.7 million fans, and on Twitter the largest account, @Edgar_Allan_Poe, at https://twitter.com/edgar_allan_poe, has more than 110,000 followers. By comparison, the total number of mentions of Edgar Allan Poe on Web pages is claimed to be 15.8 million in a Google search and 14.0 million via Bing—although no one is known to have seen them all.The popularity of social media has encouraged traditional websites to use more graphics, be more interactive, and accept blog postings. As websites and social networks have become more complex, so have the software programs needed to create and maintain them. The solitary Web creator of a generation ago—who learned Unix and who hand-coded his or her HTML in order to share on the Internet his or her enthusiasm for (and knowledge of) the subject—has been challenged by Web-making teams, often with institutional support, that have at their disposal not only ready-made Web templates and but also commercial page and site software support.The past decade was marked in part by the appearance of at least two memorable new Poe sites: Knowing Poe, at http://knowingpoe.thinkport.org/, and PoeStories, at http://poestories.com/, both of which contained features that advanced the technology of Poe webpages. Knowing Poe, designed for school use, was launched on Thinkport in 2002 with the support of the Maryland Department of Education. It announces upon opening to an arresting animated flying and croaking raven that it will require both Flash and RealPlayer (but may function nonetheless without them). It contains sections for Poe the person, Poe the writer, and a Poe library, and offers generous links for both classroom and family use. This rich and extensive site, which won a Webby award in 2005, fills the need for a Poe site for young students and their teachers. There is an extensive descriptive review of it at the Education World site at http://www.educationworld.com/awards/2003/r0303-07.shtml.PoeStories is a flourishing site launched in 2005 by the Poe enthusiast Robert Giordano (he is also a graphic artist, writer, and photographer). Giordano created his own content management system (CMS), Design 215, which uses a database for editing and updating articles and images, keeping the Poe texts separate on his server. For interface elements Giordano used Photoshop tutorials from Eyeball Design, and for styling he used cascading style sheets from CSS Zen Garden, at http://www.csszengarden.com/, both to control the visual presentation of webpages without altering their content and also to support new visual devices. The site contains story summaries, a vocabulary word list, a gallery of photographs and artworks, a Facebook connection, a guestbook, and a news archive, and it supports mobile devices. It is “sticky” in encouraging longer visits and claims more than fourteen million visitors since 2005.The relatively new DigitalPoe site, at http://digitalpoe.org/, attempts to incorporate new code elements in an interesting way. The site was built from the ground up with institutional support of the master's program in digital arts and humanities of University College Cork, at http://www.ucc.ie/en/cke09/digital-arts-and-humanities.html. It is dedicated to displaying XML and TEI encoding techniques. The two principals of the site, James O'Sullivan and Gareth Young, have cross-disciplinary experience that embraces creative work, the media, and research in the digital humanities. O'Sullivan (http://josullivan.org/), a native of Cork, was educated there and in Dublin, has written poetry, is a photographer, participates on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube, has published on the digital humanities, and is now a digital humanities research designer at Penn State University. Gareth Young (http://garethyoung.org/), a native of Wales now completing his graduate work at Cork, is a music technologist and digital composer.The DigitalPoe site shows what can be done with resources already on the Web through a Creative Commons license. The main source for digital Poe materials is Jeffrey Savoy's Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore site, http://eapoe.org/, and the interactive CSS template is from Demus Design, http://demusdesign.com/. On the Resources page the bibliography credits the Mabbott edition of Poe's works and the Quinn biography, citing the 2000 Illinois reprint of the former and the 1997 Johns Hopkins reprint of the latter. The running footer on each page states, “All content by Edgar Allan Poe, and illustrations relating to such, are in the public domain,” of which we are reminded again on the Resources page. Clicking on titles in the pages for tales and poetry brings up the full text of each work and, in most cases, some bibliographical notes on it, which conveniently remain on the screen until the page is exited.In making available in one place a wide selection of etexts and easy-to-use scholarly annotations in popups, DigitalPoe raises the bar for what the serious Poe reader can expect, although scholars will still need to do something more on their own for citations to a digital or printed source. The Resources page offers the XML files of most of the pages on the site as downloads in ZIP format. The work of encoding on the various pages is credited to O'Sullivan, Young, and other members of their team, including Anna Dowling, Lynn Harding, and Roisin O'Brien. Essentially complete by the end of 2013, the project since then has flown under the radar (a Google search reveals no other links to it). In a technical review about a year ago the website-optimization site SEOceros, at https://seoceros.com/en/digitalpoe.org, registered only minor complaints: the lack of a site map, no mobile or tablet version, and inconsistency in using the prefix “www.”Gareth Young was in the Digital Arts and Humanities Ph.D. program at University College Cork when he met James O'Sullivan, already an enthusiast for the iTunes app The Waste Land (Touchpress), which synchronized T. S. Eliot's text to sources, manuscripts, notes on Ezra Pound's editing, explanations of Eliot's allusions, audio and video readings, and commentaries. As Young revealed in an email interview, DigitalPoe aimed “to raise the profile above that of the usual Poe repositories that are available online.” By relying in part on crowdsourcing, Young explained, “We wanted a platform that was easy to pick up and contribute to…. This required the input of a number of people. In light of this, there was scope enough for the inclusion of contributions by novice users who had never coded before and of course the experts in both Poe and XML and TEI coding.” In a project proposal document, Young expected DigitalPoe to be an “online collaborative project,” working by means of “the projection of post-modern theory … to provide a network of links” to finally reach the “ultimate goal of the site is to be included in the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES) scholarly organization.” O'Sullivan modestly added in his email that “this project was never really more than a pedagogical exercise, but it was worthwhile nonetheless,” its value residing in part as “an example of what can be done by a group of students.”Although there are, admittedly, fewer websites now dedicated to Poe than there once were, Poe scholars are still well served by what is available. Jeffrey Savoye's active and growing site at the Poe Society of Baltimore remains an outstanding source for Poe materials and information online, although few users may notice that it is modernizing its computer coding. Among older sites, Project Gutenberg still provides a wide assortment of plain Poe texts at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/481, and Eserver divides itself into fiction at http://books.eserver.org/fiction/poe/ and poetry at http://books.eserver.org/poetry/poe/. Among the Internet Archive's multiple indexes, begin with https://archive.org/details/texts/ and search for Edgar Allan Poe. Two other general collections worth keeping in mind are the Making of America project, divided between Michigan and Cornell at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moagrp/ and http://digital.library.cornell.edu/m/moa; and the American Periodical Series (APS), online at http://www.proquest.com/products-services/aps.html, which requires subscription access through libraries. The Google collection of scanned texts at http://books.google.com/ still supports useful Poe searches even though it has been superseded by the more scholarly HathiTrust project, which promises more than 140,000 full-text items mentioning Poe. Start at http://www.hathitrust.org/, select full text, and search for Edgar Allan Poe. Two university Poe etext resources that have continuing university support are Virgo at the University of Virginia (start at http://search.lib.virginia.edu/ and request Edgar Allan Poe); and North Carolina's Documenting the American South, which has both volumes of the Lea and Blanchard Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, at http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/1840poe1/menu.html and http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/1840poe2/menu.html, and, in addition, both 1845 Wiley and Putnam volumes, The Raven and Other Poems at http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/poeraven/menu.html, and Tales at http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/poe/menu.html.If you are not sure where to begin, two useful search tools for etexts are the Online Books Page library at Penn, at http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/, and WorldCat, at http://www.worldcat.org/, the latter locating copies of books in nearby libraries. By the way, NINES (mentioned above) has a listing of some 2,600 items concerning Poe (go to http://www.nines.org/ and search for Edgar Allan Poe).It may be that the future of Poe websites is no longer in the hands of enthusiastic Poe volunteers of twenty years ago but rather, as Web encoding becomes more complicated, has been left to teams of workers with institutional support. In this regard, sites such as DigitalPoe are encouraging as demonstrations of what could be done, as James O'Sullivan remarked via email: “I would hope that, in the future, should another group of scholars want to build a more robust resource focused on Poe, they could do so using our corpus as a foundation. Rather than having to do much of the initial boilerplate encoding, which is quite laborious, they could simply take what we have made available, and build on that.”Poe in Cyberspace columns are archived online at eapoe.info.