is it possible to quantify the increased accessibility of (eg) fweet.org vs mchugh's book of annotations to finnegans wake?
if you have mch's book beside your keyboard, and the fweet link already in your browser's bookmarks bar, for many sorts of query the book will still be more convenient, requiring no typing and no search codes.
but fweet gives you joyce's original text along with mch's annotations, so you don't have to juggle a second volume for that, and once you feel comfortable with fweet, you'll probably usually go with it even just for that advantage.
but then there's the many additional search features that fweet offers, like searches for motifs or languages, that, in mchugh, would require painstaking page by page search.
so, assuming you're doing general fw research, fweet is easily a thousand times more useful.
and even if you have a personal reference library with all the other books that have collected fw annotations, fweet will offer a much better longterm approach to accessing these.
but most people have none of these books, and don't even live near a library or bookstore that carries even one of them.
so 'accessibility' without fweet means interlibrary loans or mail orders, vs free one-click access, which is surely many thousands of times more efficient.
but fweet as yet offers no images, no videos, and almost no offsite links.
if a hypothetical competitor to fweet troubled to track down all the possibly useful images and links, and included them in its search results, this could save many steps and might conservatively be called a hundred times more accessible.
and there's not yet anything like a fweet for joyce's other works.
ulysses will be an especially huge challenge, being analysed on dozens of websites and in hundreds of books.
so a systematic attempt to sort out and link all the online resources for ulysses, so that the path from the text to any online resource is at most a few clicks, promises a comparable improvement in accessibility.
and this is what i believe i offer in the pJoyce collection:
https://github.com/TimFinnegan/pJoyce
one-page html editions of all joyce's published works offer paragraph-specific links to annotations pages where all known resources relevant to each paragraph are being collected.
each annotations page includes a feedback form for immediate addition of resources or correction of errors.
and everything is free.
