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3. Can imagery be addressed in new ways with on-line methods? Can a collective discussion of imagery produce more scholarly knowledge than just an individual analysis? Is it possible to analyze electronic images in a scholarly manner without examining the material object? texture of the paper? printing technique? style? color?

Being able to zoom in on images would be invaluable. In my work on Prieur I sometimes used a magnifying glass to get at important details. Without this procedure my reading of Prieur's images would have been less thorough and less effective. To understand Prieur's images I compared them to images by different illustrators. The Bibliothèque Nationale Videodisk was invaluable for this part of my work. To see how Prieur and other artists depicted the same event told me something about their own individual responses. Important also was the frequency with which events were illustrated. That a particular event was depicted often can be seen as an indicator, in some measure, of its importance to contemporaries; seeing images of the Revolution was one of the ways people came to understand the Revolution. The incidence with which events were depicted and disseminated is important both in a positive and negative sense. My overall impression going through the Videodisk images was that sensational events, crowds in action for example, were depicted frequently, whereas the more mundane work of the Revolution, such as deputies carrying out legislative change, was depicted only rarely. This is hardly surprising, but going through the Videodisk and seeing the images that were there, and weren't there, or there only rarely, said something to me about how the Revolution saw itself. Also revealing was how images done outside France revealed foreign responses to the Revolution. I recall vividly images depicting foreign responses to the September Massacres, for example, as well as images indicating French responses. Comparative study of images can tell us much about the Revolution.

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