JJTM: James Joyce Text Machine 

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  • James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is the modernist work with the richest network of internal and external referents, cited in the writings of such postmodernists as Jacques Derrida, Jay David Bolter, and George P. Landow as the leading "incipient hypertext" of the modernist era. Despite several projects which have been undertaken an actual completed electronic hypertext of the work has yet to appear.

  • The original aim of James Joyce Text Machine, first presented at an ACH conference in 1991, was to demonstrate the feasibility of using the computer screen for what up to then had appeared only as a printed edition with variants and clear text en face -- Hans Walter Gabler's genetic text of Ulysses. But the software never was completed and the project remained dormant until the rise of HTML and the World Wide Web in the 1990s as a possible universal medium for scholarly hypertext publications.

  • In its present form the JJTM is dedicated to exploring universally available resources which a reasonably computer adept scholar might use for publishing electronic texts and hypertexts. It does not assume the institutional support required to mount a major project in SGML. Progress reports on the JJTM have been seen at several James Joyce conferences, in London, Berkeley, Miami, Trieste, and eleswhere. At times these explorations have appeared on the same panel as Prof. Michael Groden's Ulysses hypertext project.

  • The current demonstration uses a passage from the Calypso episode in Joyce's Ulysses. Most of the demonstrations are live -- they work -- but at least one is a mock-up. 
    Postscript 2020: This experiment (JJTM) was written in 2000-2001 as a hypertext exercise. It attepted to move the 
textual variants from the static printed page in Hans Walter Gabler's edition of Ulysses to the dynamic computer screen
-- replacing typesetting codes on paper with the endless variety of typefaces, fonts, sizes, and modes of the computer screen. 
In addition, hypertext linking made it possible to move instantly between several of Joyce's layers or stages.  As first released,
the JJTM project required slighly different versions for the browsers of the day (Netscape 5/6 and Internet Explorer 6/7). 
In 2020, the pages have been tested to run with minor failures on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.  With one exception, inactivating
a popup menu, no changes have been made in the 20-year 	old code. 
    Please use "back" or ALT-left if the return-to-menu link fails.

    Mentions: Mark C. Marino, "Ulysses on Web 2.0: Towards a Hypermedia Parallax Engine," James Joyce Quarterly,44, No. 3 (Spring, 2007), 475-499. | The James Joyce Text Machine, Heyward Ehrlich and George Vallasi, Tools for Literary Analysis, ACH 1991 - Arizona State University - Tempe | Amanda Visconti, 2016 | Landow and Delaney, 195 | https://dh-abstracts.library.cmu.edu/authors/7822 | https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article-abstract/6/4/281/1289051 | Claire Lynch, Lost in Cyberspace 2014

    Heyward Ehrlich, Professor emeritus, Dept of English, Rutgers University, Newark NJ 07102, USA | email: ehrlich@rutgers.edu
    | JJTM URL: http://heywardehrlich.com/jjtm | Last revised: 16 June 2002 (annotations 2 September 2020)