Fulfilling the promise of digital scholarship? A review of “Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger” & “The Past Impaneled”

The promise of digital scholarship—that ephemeral ideal we search for in our hopes of finding ways to use new media technology to do scholarship in ways that are not possible in other media. Joshua Brown’s book review article, “The Past Impaneled” and Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz’s hypertext project “Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger” each takes advantage of certain aspects of new media for their work, and in some measure achieves something that would not be possible in the world of traditional print.

In their description of the project, Krasniewicz and Blitz indicate that the project is more about exploring “the process of creating a digital publication” its unique characteristics such as the ability to present information in a non-linear fashion, with multiple navigation routes, links to outside information, and “unpolished materials,” than about a comprehensive presentation of all their dreams and research about Arnold Schwarzenegger as American cultural icon. The quantity of information they would have to process for a comprehensive publication is evidently massive.

The site structure and navigation in many ways mimics essential qualities of dreams with the connection of disparate information and no single organizing structure superimposed consistently over the whole. Users wander about the site without an ever-present, intrinsic navigation system. The main page provides an intriguing graphical interface that is not common among scholarly sites. Sound bites of Arnold’s voice play upon loading a file and draw the viewer into the experience of the site, reinforcing the idea that this is different.

Hypertext is woven seamlessly into the discussion, and leads the reader to either different parts of the site, or to other sites that provide information about Arnold Schwarzenegger. The greatest disadvantage to the extensive external linking in the site is that without constant maintenance, it becomes outdated with broken links, and no longer fulfills that portion of its promise of connecting many discussions into one.

Krasniewicz and Blitz state up front in their project description that they are not seeking to create a coherent analysis, instead they believe their material is best understood by exploring its bits and pieces. There is no significant nod of the head to traditional modes of scholarship.

By contrast, Joshua Brown’s book review provides a traditional (“serious”) introduction to his work (i.e. familiar writing on history) to bridge reader expectations and the unconventional form of the article. Brown proceeds to explore his topic, a review of two works of graphic historical fiction, in a vein similar to the works themselves. This graphic essay, embracing humourous illustration and informal dialogue with the reader, pulls the reader in and communicates very effectively.

The one impediment in the article is that it bumps up against technical limitations. For those readers who wish to read each word in every comic strip, the imaging technology isn't quite up to the task. However, the ability of hypertext to display a portion of the strip and allow easy access to the full strip adds to the article, enough to compensate for the image problems.

Both of these works take advantage of some of the unique characteristics of digital scholarship. Even though the integration of the technology may seem less essential for Brown than Krasniewicz and Blitz, Brown’s excellent use of a bridge between traditional scholarship and digital scholarship makes his essay more successful in fulfilling the promise of digital scholarship.

– Allison Meyer