Our approach has been based upon situating the work within the mid-nineteenth century. Consequently the annotations, collations, selections and reception history are designed to contextualise Modern Painters vol. I within the culture from which it emerged. The facsimiles, as well as promoting the prioritising of the visible, effectively constitute the actual texts that were read during this period, whilst also making apparent our own historical distance from this, as the scanned images also pick up the signs of aging from the pages - what Ruskin has described as 'the golden stain of time'.
For these reasons the mode of accessing hypertext from facsimile images was developed through the use of buttons external to the images, so that the integrity of the facsimiles would be retained for the user without the intrusion of hyperlinks.