Historians are captive to the medium within which they work. With the vast majority of our work published as print documents, we tend to think and work within print’s strengths and weaknesses. This means, we turn largely to print sources in our research, and our thinking tends to be linear. As Marshall McLuhan and other theorists have noted, the media we use are an extension of our senses, and individuals and cultures reflect the tendencies of these media and the senses to which they interface. The twentieth century historian, then, would reflect the older patterns of print media, including tactility and linearity. The new historian would look to increased use of sound and image and reflect the characteristics of newer, electronic media. However, the transition would appear to be an awkward one, as both creating and utilizing new forms of history requires training and experience.
David Westbrook’s narratives of the early comic strip reflect some of that initial fumbling. While he looks to combine the multi-path possibilities by integrating separate essay threads together, his implementation is somewhat awkward, and it is difficult to see how simply publishing separate print essays together would not serve the same function. While Westbrook was certainly able to use many more graphic images than likely in any print form, these were often marred by an inability to decipher them. As this reviewer knows through experience, images from old comics are difficult to scan and post, often requiring a great deal of contrast and size manipulation in order to make them legible. Westbrook sometimes fails to post them legibly, a key failing when the focus is analysis of the images themselves.
Westbrook succeeds in using the Internet to allow him to weave together four separate threads, in a way not impossible, but difficult, in a printed format. He also uses the ability to post thumbnail size images while allowing the reader to click on them, blow them up, and include commentary on the image itself. However, the author remains for the main wedded to the very linearity of the older print medium. One cannot help but conclude that the comic creators and their audience would both be amazed at the serious academic deconstruction of such works.
In contrast, Lynn Hunt and Jack Censer’s "Images of the French Revolution” is a more mature use of the Web, not surprisingly, as it is much more recent. Right from the beginning, it uses visuals as a way to generate interest. They utilize a collaborative capability of the Web to weave together commentary from seven scholars, and the ongoing product is a collaboration series of works, in part inspired by feedback and ongoing contributions by the others. This is a creative use of the time and distance barrier-breaking capability of the Internet. In addition, the main essays arrayed with additional comment allow a conversational flow that is not entirely linear, thus breaking through another of the traditional print media constraints.
However, some problems remain. For example, the visuals do not reproduce, even in the enlarged version, big enough to discern detail. The editors’ error is perhaps a desire to reproduce them in their original size, something they criticized earlier digital sources for not doing. While this is a useful idea, it is not one that enables the Web viewer adequate critical review. The same size in a different medium becomes somewhat useless, and rather they should allow for same size in addition to a larger version. It also would have been nice to have email addresses and perhaps even Website URL’s for the contributors. At times, the navigation of the Website is limited. Frustratingly, each section of the individual essays fails to link at the end to the next section.
Perhaps overall these examples demonstrate just how slowly we advance in utilizing new media. It took many decades for print books to mature in their own right to a form separate from those produced by hand in scriptoriums. These two examples do show growing maturation and progress in historians’ use of the Web and show promise in breaking out of some of our old habits and limita