In his early 1990’s article “The Rationale of Hypertext” Jerome McGann writes that scholars are no longer in need of “us[ing] books to sudy books” and I have been assigned to respond to this comment in a manner that discusses the possibilities for current and future epistemologies and methodologies and what possibilities this upgrade has for English and cultural studies. So, here goes.

When Jerome Mc Gann wrote that scholars no longer need to be limited to using “books to study books” he was already ahead of his time. As scholars, we now have access to materials that could often only be obtained in the past with a lengthy sabbatical, passport, and our life savings. Okay, so that is the worst case scenario, but the best case would have been a sympathetic librarian in charge of interlibrary loan. Today, we can access a majority of the material we need for research online: many books have been created in e-text format, journal articles can be accessed through online archives, and many other resources are available through similar resources. In addition, scholars now have the ability to publish their own webpages allowing scholars more resources for finding exactly what we need. No longer do we need to rely soley on a musty, moth-eaten copy of a book that may or may not be found in its place in the library stacks. We’ve come a long way, baby!

But I don’t think we’ve come to the end of the road. With the more recent emergence of wikis and collaborative websites, I think we will be able to see more of a dialogue between scholars than we have in the past. This will ultimately lead to more timely dialogues; no longer will we need to wait months (or years) for a scholar’s rebuttal to an article to appear, we’ll be able to access it as soon as it’s available. When we want to examine draft changes within a text, we’ll be able to access various versions of the text through PDF or GIF files from our desktop. While this feature is already available for authors of incredible notoriety who lived centuries ago, we’ll be able to see more current authors. For example, if a student was working on a paper based on J.K. Rowling’s novels, there would be more of a chance that Rowling had made these changes available online.

Another advantage we have that continues to grow is the ability to contact the author via email. In the past, this has been an availability since the beginning of email. However, authors are becoming more receptive to speaking via email with an individual working with their text. (I support this fact with the recent comments made on my student blogs by the author of one of the articles they are currently blogging on.) Now, authors have the ability to Google themselves, see what is being written on their work and reply as they see fit. This has the potential to lead to diret dialogue between author and scholar, between writer and student.

For teachers, this ability to present such broad means of readily available research to students provides us with a chance to expand their horizons while also teaching them about the importance of judging what they read or hear so that it meets or exceeds their own standards. In addition, as teachers, we can require more sophisticated research and refuse to accept the highly popular “they didn’t have a book on that in the library.” At the same time, if we are receptive to the “tools” of our students’ world, we will be able to enhance the tools of our own scholarship.