Where Minds Meet: New Architectures for the Study of History and Music

FAIN: HD-50408-08

Bob Stein
Unaffiliated Independent Scholar (Brooklyn, NY 11211)

Planning activities, including two symposia, to consider the future of scholarly humanities publishing within the networked environment of the Web.

With the advent of the cd-rom in the 80's, a few pioneering humanities scholars began to develop a new vocabulary of multi-layered, multi-modal digital publications. Since that time, the internet has emerged as a powerful engine for collaboration across peer networks, radically collapsing the distance between authors and readers and creating new communal spaces for work and review. To date these two evolutionary streams have mostly been separate. Rich multimedia is still largely consigned to individual consumption on the desktop, while networked collaboration generally occurs around predominantly textual media such as the blogosphere, or bite-sized fragments on YouTube and elsewhere. We propose to carry out initial planning for two ambitious digital publishing projects that would merge these streams into powerfully integrated experiences.