In Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger, Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz take unique approaches to both their scholarship and its presentation. The dreams that Krasniewicz and Blitz began having about Schwarzeneggar while writing their initial standard publication inspired them to present their findings on the web. Indeed, it became obvious to them that the web offered the only outlet to display a hypertext of non-linear thoughts and outside material. The idea is that in a website, viewers can arrive at an understanding of the material in a similar fashion that we make conclusions in everyday life: through a complex process associating bits of information.
Krasniewicz and Blitz use new media to reach their goal of providing visitors with information and links to information about Schwarzeneggar, icons, postmodernism, the “American Dream” and the function of dreams. It is true that their project could not be done well in any one other medium. However, by aiming for visitors to arrive at their own conclusions, the authors’ conclusions get lost in the shuffle. Are the authors trying to suggest that icons can contribute so significantly to our popular culture that they help shape who we are (by entering into our dreams etc.)? Are they trying to tell us that dreams necessarily affect scholarship and thus, in the interest of full disclosure, scholars should relate pertinent dreams to their audience? Or by relating their dreams are they just offering us a metaphor for what scholarship on the web might look like?
Their original intent was to examine and explain Arnold Schwarzeneggar as a cultural icon in late 20th Century American society; however, as they state on their About page, their study became a “theoretical and practical discussion of how and why this should be done in hypertext form.” If only they would have combined their initial goal with their later objective we might be able to conclude something about Schwarzeneggar-as-icon other than the realization that his “omnipresence” in popular culture was somehow influential. The manner in which we process information in every day life (both during waking and sleeping hours) is undoubtedly confusing and non-linear; why do we want to replicate this confusing process when we relate this information to one another? I found their website fun, interesting and thought-provoking, but ultimately frustrating because it did not give me what I wanted: a clear analysis of their findings.
In Hearsay of the Sun: Photography, Identity, and the Law of Evidence in Nineteenth-Century American Courts Thomas Thurston correctly notes that through the use of citations, scholars actually have much experience with using hypertext. For Thurston, if digital scholarship can do anything well, it can bring sources to the viewer in a way that the print medium cannot. Through the use of linking conventions and frames, Thurston provides his viewers with a mini built-in archive of many of his sources.
Although Thurston uses new media rather conservatively, he uses it effectively. By making source material easier to access, by offering a search function, by making his scholarship more widely available, by offering far more pictures than would be allowed in a journal, by linking to outside material and by accepting the notion that nothing on the web is permanent and therefore allowing for the possibility of a changing work product, Thurston embraces several important elements of new media. Significantly, however, Thurston incorporates the aforementioned features without drastically altering the conventions of a scholarly article. The article generally reads the way it would in print and by compressing the frames, one could easily ignore the additional features that he provides. Thurston states in his article that “The impact of photography upon the law of evidence was not inconsequential, but photography hardly transformed legal culture. Instead, contemporaneous social practice determined the uses to which this new technology was put.” If Thurston’s model of the use of new media to present scholarly research eventually proves to be the norm, one day someone may use similar language to describe the impact of the web upon historical scholarship.