Annotations and digital resources: the "modernity" paper

I have located the paper "A Critique of Modernity: On Positivism, and Phenomenology" and have begun the task of preparing a text version suitable for a test run in a research browser with annotations, tagging and related options.

The text version is in a minimal HTML format as modernity.htm

Information about the sources is in the blog post on attacks on modernity.

This is an initial quote from the paper as it appeared in the one internet source available to me (2010-03)

Modernity has two main antecedents – positivism and phenomenology. Hermeneutical variations of modernity are rationalistic, empiricist, progressive, optimistic. I intend to show how it becomes ironic when normative political theory implicitly recognizes the antecedents of modernity while simultaneously invalidating modernist moves towards achieving solutions to problems created by modernity itself.

While you might think that such statements in the guise of a contribution to discussion in the social sciences only qualifies for derision under the Harry Frankfurt BS rubric, the author is both prolific and, if Google Books is any indicator, oft referenced if not quoted.

The author of that article, an assistant professor at Singapore's National University who states on his university home page (on this date) that he has been a Visiting Scholar both of Rand and Johns Hopkins, may mean by "modernity" some global effect which only arrived in Singapore after 1929.  I can give no meaning to "hermeutical variations of modernity" nor can I tell you from these statements what "it" may refer to in his "I intend to show how it becomes ironic" and so suppose we have an idiom such as "Isn't it ironic how..."

The problem faced in digital research is to firmly link these materials and the references to them.  PDF files at allacademic.com are not always available and the text files generated from PDF's by the Adobe reader are not reliably formatted.

In the following weeks I plan to explore the use of both markup techniques and programming languages in constructing a digital technique for documented assessment and evaluation of such "contributions" to social science in the modern - or at least most recent - digital manifestation of "publish or persish" with an eye to contrasting the needs for poetry in translation and canonical philosophic texts in translation.

The outcome of Google Books disputes and the acceptance of the ePUB format may affect the result of my efforts in the short term.

My initial bias is for Curl (as in http://www.curl.com/) with alternates in a Rebol (http://www.rebol.com/) wrapper for Web Kit and ObjectIcon.  Time permitting I will further assess both Oz and Seaside for generating Curl markup versus Oz for Tk (QTk.)