(2007-08-30) Sutherland Node Idea

John Sutherland: Node idea. I have seen the future of literary criticism - and, as John Reed said - 'it works'. Works better, in fact, than Reed's beloved Soviet Union ever worked. And it will work, I believe, for other humanities disciplines. Science I'm not so sure about. But perhaps there too

What's relevant to the grand proposition with which I began this piece is how William Gibson nowadays writes, and how he demands to be read: "One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition [Gibson's previous novel] is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody's going to google everything in the text ... there's this nebulous extended text. Everything is hyperlinked now." (cf (2018-11-15) Books Vs Tweets)

Node-man mobilised a volunteer army of fellow enthusiasts and set out to create what Gibson above terms the "Google aura", or what he prefers to call the critical "cloud" that hovers over every work of literature. We can now "map" this in ways we never could before - thanks to Messrs Google and Wikipedia.

Node-man, a Gibson fan, has duly set up a website with the devotional URL node.tumblr.com. Node-man also got a very early copy of Spook Country.

The website has created a version of the cloud. It can only be a version. (gloss)

If you asked me what are the two best-annotated texts available to scholar and student in canonical English Literature, I would say the Alistair Fowler edition of Paradise Lost and the Ann Thompson edition of Hamlet. Colleagues would probably come up with alternative contenders. But they would be the same kind of footnote / endnote enterprises. Old school.

What the unknown Node-maestro has done is poles apart, both from this, and from the usual website-based 'everybody pitch in' mess. He's channelled the raw material supplied by his volunteers into a sign-posted route through Spook Country. It opens the way, I believe, to a new kind of critical commentary on texts. One can see, easily enough, how it could be extended to Paradise Lost, or Hamlet.