BETWEEN MARKUP AND DELIVERY ; Or Tomorrow ’ s Electronic Text Today

The Orlando Project has created an electronic history of women’s writing in English from its beginnings to the twentieth century. The delivery of its intensively tagged materials poses unique challenges to the design of a web site, given the prevailing wisdom on web usability. The complexity of the project’s SGML tagging schemas for the intellectual content of the project’s materials answers the need for electronic material to make its semantic content more accessible to search and retrieval, and potentially gives users considerable freedom to determine their way through the textbase. However, this very complexity may be daunting for its user community, which will be primarily composed of literary scholars. This discussion outlines the strategies the Orlando Project adopted for meeting this challenge, providing a snapshot from 2002 when Susan Brown University of Guelph