Extending the text: digital editions and the hypertextual paradigm

This paper explains some of the theoretical underpinnings informing the framework of the Virtual Humanities Lab [9] at Brown University. We argue that humanists can and should perform research collaboratively online, provided the availability of tools that suit their individual and collective needs. VHL's implementation of some such tools is extendable to treating a variety of primary sources. In its first year of development, VHL enables scholars to participate in the editing and annotation of a diverse typology of semantically encoded texts from Early Modern Italy.