In his ‘hypertextual essay” Castonquay seeks to “contribute to an underdeveloped area of film studies by exploring the ways in which early film intertextually inscribed ideologies of race, gender, and imperialism during the first American war exhibited on film to the United States public.” [5] This easily navigable essay provides extensive links to film, newspaper articles, photos, and related documents in a nonlinear format. The user is positioned to make choices about which path to take in reading and experiencing Castonquay’s essay; hence, the user does not have to follow a prescribed order which is common in other forms of scholarship. In one representative example, the user can click on to the Film Studies section and link to war films which links to the Early Cinema section. From this page the user has several paths that she can take including viewing film clips of the Rough Riders or film clips about “faking and staging war films,” or read excerpts from newspaper articles. Each subsequent page offers endless choices to follow different paths. The expansiveness is remarkable. Randy Bass agrees, he asserts that “I kept increasing the amount of visual evidence” while reading/experiencing Castonquay’s essay. [6]
Joshua Brown’s book review is presented in a more linear format; however, he successfully incorporates new media features that are unavailable in traditional historical scholarship. In examining comic strips as a vehicle for writing history, Brown cleverly creates a comic strip image of himself to illustrate his main points. In his review of Ben Katchor’s comic strip book entitled, The Jew of New York, he first discusses Julius Knipl, a character from Katchor’s earlier works. In following links about Julius Knipl the user can easily forget that this is not the comic strip that Brown is reviewing and get lost in the world of Julius Knipl. Perhaps this is an example of a problem with hypertext or with scholarly editing. Chris Ware’s comic strip while “dreary” uses color and “different visual cues to place us in specific historical moments.” [7] While the comic strip captions were sometimes difficult to read, Brown’s key points were not lost. In this essay Brown successfully, provides links to articles, full comic strips, and audio interviews within and outside of the essay. This results in an expansion that would not likely exist in printed format.
Rozensweig suggests that the “expansive space of digital media to present a good deal more than is possible in print” is a major benefit of new media in historical scholarship. [8] This expansiveness and hypertextuality along with the user’s ability to make choices is what most distinguishes successful digital scholarship from more traditional forms of scholarship.
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1Joshua Brown, "The Past Impaneled," (Book review) www.common-place.org
· vol. 1 · no. 3 · April 2001 <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/cp/vol-01/no-03/reviews/katchor-ware01.shtml
2Jerome McGann, "The Rationale of Hypertext," <http://www.village.virginia.edu/public/jjm2f/rationale.html>
3 Ibid.
4"Forum on Hypertext Scholarship: AQ as Web-Zine: Responses to AQ's Experimental
Online Issue," American Quarterly (June 1999), commentary by Roy Rosenzweig
5 James Castonguay, "The Spanish-American War in US Media Culture"
http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq/
6"Forum on Hypertext Scholarship: AQ as Web-Zine: Responses to AQ's Experimental
Online Issue," American Quarterly (June 1999), commentary by Randy Bass.
7Joshua Brown, "The Past Impaneled," (Book review) www.common-place.org · vol. 1 · no. 3 · April 2001 <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/cp/vol-01/no-03/reviews/katchor-ware01.shtml
8"Forum on Hypertext Scholarship: AQ as Web-Zine: Responses to AQ's Experimental Online Issue," American Quarterly (June 1999), commentary by Roy Rosenzweig