This project seeks to blend traditional aspects of historical narratives with the potential new media offers to create a site that is both informative and experiential. While a simple text-based history of the encyclopedia could fulfill part of the site's goals, it would not present the user with an opportunity to test the limits of oral, print, and hypertext formats.

This is the key element of the site, as it hopefully will spur the user to examine the relationship between knowledge sources and power, and discover how different formats alter this construct. This would not be possible without the power of new media, of which hypertext is not only an essential element, but which also allows for the inclusion of audio-visual material.

This project was fully conceived with an acknowledgment of the ways new media has challenged and upset conventional hierarchies, particularly within academics and scholarship. Ultimately, the user is encouraged to not only think critically about how material is presented to them, but also to become an active participant in the encyclopedic process, rather than a vessel to be filled with “expert” advice. New media, especially technologies like wikis, can be empowering through their democratic underpinnings. Furthermore, they encourage commons-based peer production, redrawing or removing the collaborative boundaries of the process to become more inclusive. The “Learning Tools” section will highlight this, allowing users to experience an entries on a single topic in an oral, text, and editable hypertext fashion. Here the unique powers and limitations of each method will be apparent through a series of interactive exercises.

Of course, since I beat this horse dead all semester, I would be remiss if I failed to mention the importance of accessibility in any defense of the project being digital. There is an inherent value in placing scholarship on the web in the simple increase in availability. In removing traditional boundaries inherent to a physical text, even simple hypertext documents revamp the academic structure. Without getting into the problems associated with the overwhelming amount of information on the web and the difficulties in locating sites, it is worth noting that the internet community becomes a new non-expert peer group which performs the necessary checks and reviews. While Google represents the cyclical, self-feeding community acceptance (by pointing people to certain sites, which in turn leads to higher page rankings, which leads to more people visiting the same sites) there does seem to be a trend of the cream rising to the top (Hitler sites aside).