Colors

This hypertext Ulysses features links of six different colors, both to save readers from looking at an unrelieved monochrome sea of blue links and to direct them to different kinds of content in the notes. The categories are arbitrary, and very often the decision to assign a note to one of them must be arbitrary too, since some notes don't fit any category neatly and many of them might reasonably be placed in two or three. The Sandycove tower, for instance, may be understood as a physical structure in the environs of Dublin, as a remnant of Ireland's military history, or as a symbol evoking narratives in Homeric and Shakespearean literature. In hundreds of such cases, the color used represents the category that applies to the largest amount of the note’s content, or, in cases where a note glosses multiple passages, the operative context in some part of the novel.

Ireland

Green links refer to Irish and British history, politics, language, religions, customs, humor,  mythology, sports, economics, industry, geography, transport, flora, fauna, and weather.

Literature

Orange links are for published texts: poetry, fiction, drama, philosophy, history, critical essays, scripture, theology, science, biography, hagiography, travelogues, newspapers.

Dublin

Brown links point to landforms like the river and bay, the built environment such as streets, canals, buildings, bridges, trams, and statues, civic institutions, and ephemera such as money.

Performances

Purple links concern songs, operas, oratorios, liturgical rites, prayers, stage plays and informal role playing, speeches and recitations, rhetorical devices, nursery rhymes, advertising pitches, personas, disguises, and public displays.

The Body

Red links indicate matters of anatomy, sexuality, childbirth, eating, drinking, excretion, disease, death, medicines, poisons, clothes, personal accessories, the physiology of emotion, the vagaries of memory, mental illness, and dreams.

The Writer

Blue links address narrative styles, techniques, effects, and revisions, the novel's many textual variants, Joyce's aesthetic theories, and his shaping of real lives into fictional ones.