Bartleby, the Scrivener: An interactive, annotated story of Wall Street | Hacker News Reader

Bartleby, the Scrivener: An interactive, annotated story of Wall Street

slate.com

27 pointssamclemens9 comments

I read this in 1995 in a freezing cold bedroom lying atop a pale pink candlewick bedspread with the dismal damp Irish night wind howling outside. Pages from Benito Cereno were falling periodically out from the thirty year old penguin paperback. I was on a very mild acid trip (first and last). It was wonderful.

Reading it on a screen with these dull minded annotations? I'd hate for this to be anyone's first experience of it...

> dull minded annotations

Is scandox making an assertion here? Could be, or perhaps it's a just a meager judgement. Whether or not he/she really thinks this is a pleasant first experience is open to question.

To clarify: the annotations are grand really but I don't find notes, footnotes and introductions good companions to literature. They break the flow of one's reading. They should be kept strictly at the back and not intrude on the text. Reading a story like this is personal and immersive...this text breaks that down.

I agree. Reading is a linear process, and any attempt to insert annotations or footnotes should be as integrated with the material as any other part of the story.

I wish reading were a more linear process for me. Explicitly annotated or not, the better I find a work, the more uncontrollably my thoughts proliferate as I read, and I'm consequently having to re-read and re-read particularly thought-inducing paragraphs. There's obviously a material difference between authors/editors inserting their own thoughts and me inserting my own, but either way, the better the text, the less linear it is.

I'm with you. I think that maybe we take in media passively so often these days (movies, music, radio) that when left to our own devices our mind get a little too excited.

A critical reading of an annotated text can always be one's second reading of that text, you know.

Well, I've had a book with footnotes at the back, and that breaks it up more, because I keep flipping to the back to find out what the footnote says. (I suppose the answer is for me to not feel compelled to check out what the footnotes say...)

What you may need is something like reversing the direction of the links. That is: A footnote is a link from the main text to the note. The links (or the indications of the links) clutter up the main text, breaking the flow (or at least inviting you to do so). For a normal text with a few footnotes, that's probably the right approach. But for a story with annotations, maybe the right answer is to have the annotations have links to the text. That way, you can just read the clean, unannotated story. Or you can read the annotations and see the story text that they refer to.

An alternate approach would be to have a switch, where you could turn off the display of the annotations.

Interesting piece. But did anyone else find the website screwed with their scrolling along the x axis?

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