Scholarly editing is commonly the work of specialists. For readers and users, engaging with editions in print has in the past been essentially receptive. This need no longer be so for editions in the digital medium. Open Editions Online offers James Joyce's Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses for interactive use in progressive dialog. The foundational texts are the reading texts for these works from the scholarly editions prepared by Hans Walter Gabler and his co-editors in 1993 (Dubliners, Portrait) and 1984/86 (Ulysses), respectively.
As initially encountered in Open Editions Online, the texts are pre-furnished with a 'nest-egg' grouping of marked-up categories of information: Dialog attribution; Text genre; Language; Line numbers. The categories can be clicked on or off. The line numbers provide elementary orientation for the digital intra-text navigation, as well as for moving between screen and book: line numbers are identical throughout in the respective digital and book publications. Text genre and Language help to gauge the stylistic width of the narrative. The dialog attribution serves to identify characters narrated as speaking and to research the intensity of their participation in the narrated events, as well as, for instance, what they are severally and together talking about.
The dialog attribution group models the potentially most richly expandable form of mark-up for information and annotation. It opens the gateway to manifold semantic enrichment of an Open Edition Online text instantiation. Being open-source, the site may be individually downloaded to a user's personal computer environment. This includes open-source access, too, to the mark-up tool-kit. Competently deployed, the tools will allow the user to define fresh mark-up categories of her personal choice so as to render them addressable for further exploration and research. Through such dynamically progressive dialog, the edition text will become successively enlarged into an annotated edition. Conceivably, individual users who start by each building their own enriched editions might eventually group together and pool their digital paths to understanding and insight.