Thursday, April 02, 2009

Hyperlinking endnotes: a suggestion for James Crossley

I am currently enjoying James Crossley's Jesus in An Age of Terror and hope to comment here in due course. One quick suggestion comes to mind as I read the piece that is going to be of the most interest to those of us here, Chapter 2, "The Politics of the Bibliobloggers". There are 94 endnotes to this chapter, most of them with one or more URLs pointing to a particular blog post. Now, few of us are going to go to our machines and type these in, letter by letter, so the ideal would be to have an online version of the endnotes in which each URL is hyperlinked. It's an excellent time-saving device and it helps readers to investigate the claims made here for themselves. Moreover, because of link-rot, dozens of these URLs are already defunct, and the presence of even the defunct URL would allow a quick copy and paste to archive.org.

Just in case you think this sounds terribly theoretical, I have a model for this kind of thing which I created back in 2004 when I was invited by Robert Webb and Kathleen Corely to contribute to a book on The Passion of the Christ. The book has its own page at Jesus and Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, with its full hyperlinked footnotes page here.