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A Review of Digital Scholarship
In this journal entry I’ll be commenting on the essays: "Hearsay of the Sun: Photography, Identity, and the Law of Evidence in Nineteenth-Century American Courts" by Thomas Thurston; and “From Hogan's Alley to Coconino County: Three Narratives of the Early Comic Strip" by David Westbrook. Before I start I have one general observation to make. Has nothing of any significance been done in the last three years? The most recent of the essays from which we were to choose were completed in the year 2000 with the rest from the year 1999. If one of the areas we are to critique is the “promise of digital scholarship” it would appear that this promise is failing from lack of participation. Is no one interested in producing scholarly work in digital media? One of the ways the original community of web designers developed and improved their work was by looking at what somebody else had put up on the web and saying to themselves “I can do that better” or “I can do that with more elegant coding.” This point of view is important when approaching digital scholarship because the author will be much more involved in the production of the final work than in traditional print medium. As Susan Smulyan observed in her article: “For the author, I'd estimate a hypertext article would take five times the work needed for publishing a conventional print article, not an insubstantial commitment, some would say drawback, for this kind of presentation. And I doubt that future electronic journals would take back these tasks since many seem integral to the projects and need to be done by the author.”[1]
Thomas Thurston in “Hearsay of the Sun” is both technologically innovative and scholastically conservative. As a general rule web designers are encouraged to stay away from frames. Professor Thurston has done an elegant job of using frames to support the hypertextual aspects of his essay. In this instance the frames enhance the usability of the web site. Unfortunately, the principal negative aspect of frames, only the last frame clicked is the one that keyboard short cuts or toolbars work in. Not so sadly frames are officially a dead end technology since the World Wide Web Consortium has placed them on the list of HTML tags to be deemphasized with the goal of eventual elimination.
Why the frames work so well here ties in the conservative structure of the essay. “Hearsay of the Sun” need not have been presented in a digital medium. It is a regular academic journal article in a linear format with all the appropriate citations attached. Where the digital medium provides an improvement over the traditional journal is that with this essay the evil of endnotes is circumvented. The advantage of footnotes over endnotes is that citations can be checked with only a minor disruption to the flow of reading, a quick flick of the eyes to the bottom of the page and then a return to the text. In this digital article the equivalent of footnotes appear in a separate frame. All the reader has to do is click on the citation mark and the note appears in the note frame. The essay is still displayed in its frame so returning is easy.
The other technological addition to the essay is the inclusion of the sources from which many of the citations come. This allows the reader to pursue the subject further than might normally be possible with the traditional journal article. Access to the sources would also give the reader the opportunity to validate the author’s use of the source. In other words has the author used the source out of context.
On the whole this is not the best possible example of the use of digital media to present a scholarly work.
David Westbrook’s “Hogan’s Alley to Coconino County” has a more sophisticated use of the digital media than the “Hearsay of the Sun” essay. Professor Westbrook begins by conceiving of his essay in a non-linear fashion. He presents the reader with three “threads” in his essay about the early comic strip: The business of the Strips, The Culture of the Marketplace in the Strips, and Spectatorship and Framing the Strips. None of these three are considered by the author as sufficient to stand alone as an essay. At the same time they are not sequential in temporal construction but parallel so they could not easily be placed one after the other in a conventional print article. The points of commonality between the tracks are specific examples of the comic strips under review.
This parallel construction is a different form of non-linearity than is found in the “Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger” essay. Here everything starts fro the same point and ends at the same point there are just three defined and temporally parallel ways to get there. In Krasniewicz and Blitz there is no real start, end, or one true path.
Westbrook exploits the power of the digital medial in the number of comic strips he uses as examples. These far exceed what any normal academic journal would devote to graphic material. The color strips are in color as well. Again if an academic journal were to print a graphic it would be black and white because of the expense of color printing. The web not only allows a scholar to more or less self-publish but to use non-textual elements in types and numbers not possible with traditional academic presses.
The problem with this essay is that we don’t have a form of notation to facilitate parallel narrative. Music notation is an example of a simultaneous graphic representation of two or more parallel threads. There is nothing similar for text and that is what is needed here to keep the reader oriented. While the reader may be concentrating on one thread she needs to know what is occurring in the other threads. Otherwise what is the purpose of having parallel threads? Being able to shift from one to the other is nice but with some way of keeping track of all three at once it just becomes a gimmick. I for one think some way can be found to do this we’re just not there yet.
NOTES
[1]Smulyan, Susan, “Everyone A Reviewer? Problems and Possibilities in Hypertext Scholarship”, American Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 2, pp 263-267
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