Clio Wired (History 696)

Roy Rosenzweig, in Crashing the System?: Hypertext and Scholarship on American Culture, stresses that the four articles published by American Quarterly during their 1999 Forum on Hypertext Scholarship would be held to the same standards as print essays. These standards are “solid research, crisp analysis, interdisciplinarity, and clear prose.” This sounds remarkably similar to the rubric we have developed in our class (with the help of Dr. Kelly), namely that all scholarship must be original, based on research, peer reviewed, and public.

Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger and From Hogan's Alley to Coconino County: Three Narratives of the Early Comic Strip fulfill our class’s rubric, and we can assume that Dr. Rosenzweig agreed that they meet his (and AQ’s) standard as well, as they were chosen for publication. But would they excite the seer of cyberspace, Janet Murray? Do these two hypertexts fulfill the dream that Murray holds for digital scholarship, that somehow the medium of the Internet will give these works a level of importance that will transcend what they could achieve on the printed page?

Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz, in their hypertext Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger, certainly utilize the capabilities of the World Wide Web to the fullest extent. Their site uses at various times audio clips (annoyingly played when each page is loaded, every time), pictures, internal links between topics, Quicktime VR interactivity, and more. Originating in a desire to explain the Arnold Schwarzenegger myth as a central narrative in our postmodern culture, this joint project soon burgeoned beyond a simple authorial collaboration. Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger swerves giddily between semiotics and history, film studies and hermeneutics. While working on their article, Krasniewicz and Blitz began to dream about Arnold, over one hundred and forty dreams between the two of them over a ten year period, if the authors are to be believed. Recognizing the intertextual relevance of these dreams to their work, they decided to convert the project into a hypertext. The finished webpages consist of many parts, which the authors claim as the result of a dream wherein Arnold told Blitz that to understand him, Blitz must cut the Austrian actor into many parts. Take that as you will. Pages include summaries of all the dreams Blitz and Krasniewicz had about Arnold, dozens of film reviews situating Arnold in our culture as signifier of maleness, power, and many other things I didn’t understand, and the vast amount of correspondence generated over ten years between these two authors, in the form of copies of their e-mails to each other.

But what does it all mean? In the end, not much. I don’t think it’s my lack of background in semiotics or cultural studies. Instead, I think this is so much sound and fury, signifying nothing. The authors have exploited the vast storage capacity of the World Wide Web and vomited forth a mass of material with questionable value and even less coherence. The central motif of Arnold Schwarzenegger is not enough to tie together these disparate webpages. Just like a Hollywood blockbuster starring its focus, Dream Arnold Schwarzenegger is a product with a lot of energy and glitz, but you won’t be thinking about it next week.

In contrast, David Westbrook has selected a very small corner of mass media/culture and generated a hypertext that is well served by the medium of the Internet. From Hogan's Alley to Coconino County: Three Narratives of the Early Comic Strip weaves together three essays that examine the history of early comic strips in late nineteenth/early twentieth century American newspapers. These essays are entirely independent, though each makes use of the same database of comic pictures. Westbrook alternately examines the economic business of comic strip publishing, the culture reflected within the comic strips, and finally the experimentation with and evolution of the form of the comic strip by the authors of the strips themselves. These essays have imbedded images of the strips that the text cites as examples, which enlarge in new pop up windows when the user clicks on them. Each image then has multiple layers of information that the user can add or remove at will, to explore the various themes traced by Westbrook. There are internal links within each text and in the explanations attached to each image that will guide the user through all three essays, although it is possible for a reader to focus entirely on one theme and choose to avoid the other two.

Many histories of comic strips have been written and published in book form, with expensive glossy pages and full-color examples of the strips discussed. But Westbrook is able to lend a level of interactivity and immersion to his images with his layer technique that would be wholly absent in print media. Although when compared either by word count or as a simple sum of bytes of information, Westbrook’s site is dwarfed by the Brobdingnagian Arnold site (commentary by Blitz and Krasniewicz on bodybuilding?), From Hogan’s Alley to Coconino County holds a more satisfying historical narrative. As we all know, a narrative must be coherent, plausible, and internally consistent. Westbrook succeeds at all three, while Blitz and Krasniewicz fail at all but the last and I believe I am being charitable.

So, after evaluating these two sites, the promise of digital scholarship is batting .500, which is great for baseball but poor for historical research. The most “dangerous” element of digital scholarship is narcissism. With length, word count, image quality, number of videos, etc., limited only by the bandwidth an author is willing to buy (or be provided by a sponsor), the temptation is to throw everything related to a project on-line and posture about providing the user with a vast amount of “interactivity.” Clicking through pages of personal, usually off-topic e-mails is not interactivity, however. Just as most of the extras (especially commentaries) on DVDs are never used, all these “extras” tacked onto to websites nominally dealing with history end up being just so much clutter.