[1] From: John Slatin <jslatin@mail.utexas.edu> (10)
Subject: Re: 9.538 CD-ROM dissertations?
[2] From: Jeff Schwartz <jeffs@bgsuvax.bgsu.edu> (12)
Subject: Re: 9.538 CD-ROM dissertations?
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 1996 08:22:45 -0600
From: John Slatin <jslatin@mail.utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: 9.538 CD-ROM dissertations?
Leslie Jarmon, in the College of Communications, is the first Ph.D.
candidate at UT Austin to receive approval for a CD-ROM based dissertation.
I also have a graduate student who plans to submit a CD-ROM as a
*supplement* to her disertation, which concerns interface design and
electronic document design..
Professor John M. Slatin
Director, Computer Writing & Research Lab
Div. of Rhetoric and Composition and Dept. of English
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712
jslatin@mail.utexas.edu http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 1996 03:08:16 -0500 (EST)
From: Jeff Schwartz <jeffs@bgsuvax.bgsu.edu>
Subject: Re: 9.538 CD-ROM dissertations?
As a former student of Dr. Grant's and a friend of the person doing the
CD-ROM dissertation, I still must say that I am extremely sceptical about
this project. The CD-ROM medium is extremely expensive to produce (how
does this student have access to a CD recorder?) and is likely to be
short-lived (a new high density CD-ROM format, which will be incompatible
with existing hardware, is in the works and will ship this year).
We should not be talking about CD-ROM, but about hypertext and multimedia.
Whatever this student is doing, it would be better presented as a set of
html documents, a Storyspace program, or a Hypercard stack. It is
important not to fetishize the medium. Content must be the object of
judgement, not the sophistication of the presentation. What will this text
do that could not be done in a book, and is its content as valuable to the
scholarly community as that of a conventional dis?