The difficulties involved with creating a comprehensive electronic knowledge site for print literature are enormous. Ideally, all contextual information associated with a specific literary text would in some fashion be included in the site. This ideal is not only grand, but essentially impossible. Nonetheless, it is much more important to strive for a comprehensive site and fail than to knowingly omit relevant contextual information surrounding a given literary work in order to create a tailored presentation of that work.
Scholarship in literary theory and criticism has lead to an awareness of our situatedness with respect to cultural factors. Factors such as time, geography, our interests, our ideologies, and our personal experiences all combine to mediate our particular cultural perspective. These same factors influence how we read and interpret literary material. If our present or contemporary cultural factors influence so greatly our interaction with historical texts, it can be assumed that historical factors influenced those who produced the historical texts in the first place.
Victorian fiction serves as an example, although any genre from any time period would do, as to how contemporary readers use or misuse historical texts. While todays readers of Victorian literature necessarily bring with them a contemporary cultural perspective, they probably know very little of the historical climate present during the nitial writing and publication of the work. So, readers ignorant of historical conditions most likely misinterpret or at least do not fully realize historical implications. However, an ideal reader that is prepared with a sufficient contextual understanding of Victorian times to effectively decipher those implications simply does not exist.
In recent years there has been a shift away from aesthetically evaluating major writers of this time period to a historical investigation of the conditions surrounding the reading, writing, and publication of Victorian fiction. The Victorian period is known as the Age of the Novel due to an estimated 40,000-50,000 novels written by 3,500 authors that were published in England during the better part of the 19th century. To compound the problem, there exists no comprehensive repository for a reader to reference. The complications continue as one recognizes the forms of fiction, such as serialized fiction, revised editions, and books in poor condition that are left out of the major collections of Victorian fiction. The current situation makes clear the impossibility of one becoming familiar with such an abundance of material much less gaining some kind of comprehensive historical perspective.
Studies that focus on specific aspects of Victorian fiction tend to lead to disappointing conclusions due to the necessarily small sample of data that researchers must work with. Also, research with focused methodologies, such as a Marxist approach likewise disappoint because the scope of the available evidence is too large to lead to any comprehensive claims. It seems likely that no comprehensive historical perspective can be reclaimed due to the sheer volume of material at hand.
A specific investigation of the Baron Bernhard Tauchnitz can perhaps illuminate the difficulties of drawing conclusions from historical information. Tauchnitz, through literary imperialism assembled an unparalleled publishing company that attempted to institute a monopoly on the publication of British and American writers worldwide. The question that remains to modern day historians of the book is did his techniques do a service to the literary world or was the Baron a greedy opportunist who negatively altered the nature of 19th century literature and publication by excluding indigenous literature. The main point is that historians have the responsibilities to recount not only facts but the resonances between facts considering the contextual information available.
We can never be sure of exactly what happened in the past despite historical evidence. We can make subjective assumptions about history based on circumstantial evidence that exists. The nature of the knowledge site then seems to be an enterprise that should attempt to comprehensively include all relevant material that pertains to a given area of research instead of attempting to extrapolate a concrete historical perspective.