campfire design
Her Sundays are slow, leisurely pauses in an otherwise crowded schedule. Getting up from the breakfast table, she pulls her dressing gown closely around her, gathers up her coffee and the newspaper, and moves to her cozy living room. She turns up the gas fire just a bit, and lets herself slide into a chair that has grown so molded to her body over the years that now she is the only person who is completely comfortable in it. Deliberately, she separates the first section of the paper and begins to look over the headlines. She will eventually read most of it, but she is checking to see where she will begin. She will spend the next half hour with the morning news, and it is a time she values greatly.
"People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath." Marshall McLuhan had a knack for telling a whole story in one line. Of course this is exactly the same idea that Skaay expressed in Raven Travelling. It was also McLuhan's observation that any new medium must first substitute for, or replace, existing medium before it can fulfil a potential of its own. In trying to establish or understand a new technology, the first steps are to refer to, compare to, and necessarily use elements of the technology that is being supplanted. McLuhan probably best articulated this idea in his 1988 book, Laws of Media: the New Science.
http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/agora/index.cfm
Agora is an online journal published by graduate students at the University of Alberta. This is the simplest use of the campfire. It is created by uploading regular print material for storage and distribution on the Internet. It is limited to text and contains neither hypertext nor interactive links. All of the articles are also posted in pdf format so that they may be printed. The appearance of the site is very businesslike, almost as if the editors are making a concerted effort to avoid frivolous or flashy presentation style. It would seem that there is very little here to distinguish Agora from any print based journal, were it not for its accessibility. The potential for readership is certainly much greater in this format than would be possible in a printed version.
http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/2-02/2-02brown-e.htm
David Brown is a researcher in the School of Sport and Health Sciences at Exeter University. His article in Forum: Qualitative Social Research adresses many of the same issues that apply to Humanities researches encounter when we approach the campfire.
Forum: Qualitative Social Research is a peer-reviewed multilingual online journal. The material is almost completely textual. Hypertextuality and interactivity are used as a menu and are generally limited to skipping directly to the desired chapters. Its objective is universal accessibility to the material.
Note the exclamation point! Part of the excitement in this kind of publication is the likelihood of the material being altered or improved by input from colleagues around the world. Information is immediate, current, and fluid. This is not a particilarily seductive website visually, but that is clearly not its intent. It looks like any number of standard PowerPoint presentations, so most of its readers would be familiar and comfortable with the format. The site is intended to be used.
The article is also typical in its self-reflexivity. Brown is dealing with the confrontation between the content of the site, in his case his research the data and the more interpretive aspects of presentation and analysis. Bacause this is a young medium, there is still much to be discovered about its nature and its potential. Naturally, a lot of authors, myself included, have a lot to say about it. That potential is of course going to be limited until we become comfortable enough with the medium that we can directly address Humanities issues without the continued need for analysis of the technology.
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/4/3/chen.html
Sociological Research Online is published jointly by the Universities of Surrey and Stirling, Sage Publications Ltd. and the British Sociological Association. The design and layout of this site are clear and direct, using primarily text with only a few illustrative images. Though imagery is not a fundamental part of the site, the precision of the format lends the site an authoritative elegance. And since nearly all of the information is in a default format, it can be readily downloaded and used by its readers. The site provides an excellent model for the development of online publication.
In the life of a story, the listener is as important as the storyteller, and the viability of the medium depends on an interaction between the two. This article by Peter Chen and S.M. Hinton of The Australian National University discusses an interactive method of long distance interviewing. It is a pivotal aspect of Internet publication just how easily the technology can be inverted to allow the author/storyteller to become the reader/listener. The campfire has always been a place for story gathering as much as for storytelling.
http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/index.html
Kairos is published by Texas Tech University. It is a peer reviewed online journal that deals with material written specifically for online publication. The Internet can certainly be used to transcibe existing printed texts, or to publish new material written in the same form as printed text. But online publication has the potential to differ greatly from print in both form and content.
This portion of the journal's mission statement recognizes that new media necessitates a shift not only in the ways that we communicate, but in the ways that we think. Writing in 1982, Walter Ong presciently described the shift we are now experiencing. Of course in Orality and Literacy he was making comparisons in a shift that happened a millenium ago. It is very illuminating to note the similarities in our present cultural reaction to change. But it is equally important to note the aspects of orality that are being rediscovered and re-emphasized in this new medium.
http://www.kent.ac.uk/sdfva/rp/abstract.html
Alan Beck teaches drama at the University of Kent: School of Drama, Film and Visual Arts. This essay publication is almost entirely textual with a few decorative illustrations. Hypertextuality is used as a menu or index, and is limited to connecting directly to the desired chapters. In many respects it is very similar to any essay published in any print journal, and it is a format that we readily understand and accept. The article is published online by Sound Journal. , and it demostrates the efficiency of this delivery method. It is actually posted on Beck's own site at the University of Kent, then is peer reviewed by the editorial board of the journal, and a link is created on journal's website. There is no wasted time or energy rewriting or compositing or even uploading the material.
Certainly the case may be made that Internet technology will encroach on the domain of print media. It is well to remember, as Beck points out in this article, that there are other media which may be affected and which will provide refernence and elements to be used in the construction of the new medium.