8.0134 Future of Multimedia Research? (1/40)
Elaine Brennan (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Sun, 7 Aug 1994 22:05:26 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 8, No. 0134. Sunday, 7 Aug 1994.
Date: Fri, 05 Aug 94 17:27:41 EDT
From: John Saillant <SAILLANT@BROWNVM>
Subject: Future of multimedia research?
I'd like to hear opinions on the future use of multimedia material in
research and scholarship, as opposed to teaching. At the moment, we have
CD-ROMs like _Who Built America?_, which is a multimedia textbook. I'm
curious to know, however, how scholars think they will use multimedia
material in their research, perhaps in publishing CD-ROM "essays" or
"books" or files available on the World Wide Web?
A few questions come to mind. Just to make a short, spontaneous list,
what would you do if you had access to photographic-quality images of
clocks, buildings and building plans, furniture, paintings, title
pages of first editions, and quilts and could use these images in
a computerized work? How do you think scholarship will change when
we store vast amounts of data, say a painter's entire oeuvre, in a
CD-ROM or a WWW file? How would scholarship in music, say, be affected
by the ability to include performances in sight & sound, along with
images of the instruments used or the place in which the music was
performed? What is the scholarly value of a computer file that can
show the differences among a number of similar objects, such as a
collection of clocks or clothing or firearms or shackles?
How do you think work on, say, broadsides would be different if the
scholar could display a large collection of broadsides in an
essay, instead of the one or two or three we might use in a
journal article or book?
I don't intend this to be an exhaustive list of questions, and they are
surely conditioned by my own interests in early America. But it's
evident from CD-ROMs &, even more so, from the WWW, that computers are
creating new opportunities. I don't have answers to those questions, of
course, or even really know if computers will result in real
differences in scholarship. I would like to hear from others,
particularly in early American studies but also in any area of the
humanities.
John Daniel Saillant
Moderator, IEAHCNET
Visiting Assistant Professor, History
Brown University, Box N
Providence, R.I. 02912
Saillant@Brownvm.Brown.EDU