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Enhanced e-text

In this workbench, the term enhanced e-text refers to e-texts with all sorts of added functionality. This can be, for example, a table of contents and/or browsing buttons that simplify navigation through a text, a tool to search the web for words or search the text for certain phrases, or links in the text, footnotes or endnotes, and/or text glosses that can be clicked by the user to request additional information. The ultimate form of interactive e-text is the presentation of a literary, philosophical or historical text as a hypertext, in which various internal links connect words, concepts and/or text fragments. There may also be a feature that provides access to an online concordance for the text, or additional (secondary) information about the text.

These additional features make e-texts especially useful as study objects. The more functionality an e-text contains, the more operations are required in order to use it for one's own research after downloading (such as computer-assisted text analysis). If that is your goal, it is usually better to look for another version of the text.

Note: The digital critical edition is a special kind of enhanced e-text, which is treated separately.

Examples:

• Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island. This e-text contains a table of contents, as well as links that allow users to request more information about certain words (source: C.E. Merrill).
• T. Maccius Plautus, Pseudolus. Every word in this e-text is linked with a translation in a lexicon (source: Perseus).
• Boethius, Consolatio Philosophiae. This e-text has a table of contents. Many words are links that lead to word explanations and a translation is available for each fragment of text. The text also links to an online concordance for the text. Note: after selecting an option (text, commentary, translation or concordance you must also click on the [switch to:] button in order to activate the option.
• The Auchinlek manuscript. Online e-texts that can be read line-by-line and can be searched with a special search function with facsimiles of every page, which add to the e-texts by showing the original layout. The manuscript also allows the researcher to check the quality of his or her transcripts.
• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. Hypertext version of this novel (source: Pemberly).

Other topics in this section: Introduction   Digital facsimile   E-text   Critical edition   E-books and audiobooks