The Electronic Library of Lutheranism: Project Wittenberg Documents in Hypertext Part One: Philosophy and Assumptions Draft One: October 10, 1996 History The very first texts of the Christian faith were written in ink upon scrolls. Easier to create and to transport, convenient to record large works, the scroll was the first medium on which God's Word was recorded. Yet scrolls were very expensive to produce and to own. Scholars labored when referring to many passages and comparing the text in one place with that of another. Memory was still the most useful way to pass down the Scriptures and the words of the Christian fathers. When the codex, the book, first became truly popular in the seventh to the eighth century A.D., it changed radically the way scholars studied. Now it was easy to page back and forth between passages in the same work. Now multiple works could be studied with relative ease. Books were less expensive to produce and more available. Books lend themselves to detailed arguments, written with a beginning, a middle and an end. They allowed for reference from one work to another. They lent a illusion of authorship, a fantasy that you could produce something truly unique. The movable type printing press made the book truly popular. Rather than producing works by hand, one copy at a time, books rolled off the press quickly, hundreds, then thousands, then millions at a printing. They were easier to edit, cheaper to produce and quickly available. As books became less expensive, average people could own them and learn to read them. The reformation was effective in no small part because of the press. Still, the basic way of scholarship changed little until the present day. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought radical changes in the way information is recorded and processed. Photography captures images, video preserves events, audio stores sound for future generations, and now, electronic text allows for books without covers, libraries without walls. In this environment, the newest form of literacy has begun to emerge. Hypertext allows for authors to reason and to write in a whole new way. Footnotes no longer interfere with the flow of text. A click displays a fuller explanation of a concept, eliminating tangential argument. Links carry the reader not to a reference, but to the work on which the author builds his or her thesis. Readers select their own paths through a discipline. Search engines bring passages together in ways never possible before. Hypertextual editions of physical texts allow a researcher to study a subject or document deeply, to perform music with a hymn, to illustrate themes with art and motion, to understand new concepts and to gain a fuller appreciation for the work before them. Project Wittenberg's Electronic Library of Lutheranism will be a beginning to a hypertextual treasury of the works of Martin Luther and those who follow in his tradition of Christian faith. It will be an enduring witness to these people and a doorway into a new understanding of our place within today's world, and, for Lutherans, within the faith passed down to them from Christ to Luther to this very day. General Assumptions and Principles 1. Project Wittenberg documents in HTML will be more than simple text. They will go beyond a simple typesetting for web browsers. Where the author of a text quotes the Scripture, the witness of the Church or other literature, the ELL version of Project Wittenberg texts will link to the source in context. 2. ELL documents stand within the tradition of textual transmission of Lutheran texts in a unique way. Since physical versions of the documents will never be online, since the dynamic nature of electronic text makes it easy to copy, since the context of a passage is easily lost in the totality of a text array, Project Wittenberg hypertext authors will be careful to fully cite the physical source of each text in each file of a document. A title page will begin each document, containing the traditional information of a physical title page. 3. Links will be set on each page to take the reader to the title page of the text and to the last page in the text. A trail will take the reader though the work in sequence. Links will also take the reader to the index page of the ELL and the Project Wittenberg Home Page. 4. The tag will cite a short version of the title and both the number of parts in the whole and the page's place within it. Each page will have a <!--> with the Author, title, subject keywords in it. The URL of the title page will also appear in an appropriate <head> tag. 5. Graphical elements will be used sparingly to conserve bandwidth and to allow for speedy display of each page. Audio files should be appropriate to the text and small in size to allow fast download. Where possible, low resolution, thumbnail views of images should be used to point to the full image, giving the reader a choice of displaying it. 6. Project Wittenberg will encourage the use of pure HTML 2.0 wherever possible, marking for function, not for style. For example, <strong> is favored over <b>, <h1> over font specifications. Background patterns, colors and sounds are acceptable, when tagged in ways which are ignored by text only browsers. Netscape Navagator and Microsoft Explorer extensions may be used only when they are ignored in other browsers. For instance, table and frame tags may not be used. 7. ELL texts will be broken into logical units, preferably those of the text itself. Text files will be no longer than 75k each. 8. Reference schemes not included in the original text will be hidden from view. Reference systems in the original texts will be preserved. For example, verse numbers in Biblical Chapters will be in <a href name=> but not in the rendered text. 9. Color and pattern schemes may be used, but should be kept simple and muted. Link colors should be left to the choice of the browser used by the reader. 10. The Electronic Library of Lutheranism will have three control pages/arrays to integrate the documents in it. The Author page/array will list each author alphabetically. The Title page/array will be organized chronologically and alphabetically. The Topic page will link to Subject heading pages. These will refer to targets within the text pages and will be linked to from the texts at the sectional or paragraph level. Ordinarily, no more than one or two links from a paragraph to the topic array will be made. ------------------------------------------------- file: /pub/resources/text/wittenberg: 00ell-1.txt .