frames, anchors, and social contracts
I was really impressed by Thomas Thurston’s use of frames his essay, Hearsay of the Sun. The ability to click on a footnote and have the footnote appear to the right of the essay without moving to the bottom of the page is amazing. Even better are the “anchor” tags, which pull up the actual transcribed source to the right of the essay, enabling the reader to look at the essay and the actual source at the same time. I wonder why more historical websites do not use similar features? Is special software required? Is it time consuming? I imagine including numerous “anchor” tags such as Thurston does can be very time consuming, as you have to create all the text you want to anchor. Still, I would think framing and anchoring are so advantageous for historians they would be used more frequently.
Roy Rosenzweig in “Crashing the System?: Hypertext and Scholarship on American Culture”, brings up some good points about expectations and standards for online scholarly work. It is well known that graduate students do not read every page of every book. Yet Rosenzweig points to the “unwritten social contract” between readers and writers. In regards to the discussion of graduate students knowing how to “read” books this is very similar to the William Turkel article we read earlier this semester. Rosenzweig makes a great point when he asks how much do you need to read of online works to actually have “read” them? As he points out in many online works the thesis can be difficult to locate. He contends that as online scholarship progresses standards and expectations will decrease problems such as the social relationship between the writer and readers. Will this mean a new “unwritten social contract” between readers and writers? If so, will it follow the lines of the one already in place. Or will it be unique to online works?
In thinking about this question, I thought back to my sociology classes in undergrad. One of the great things about sociological essays is they provide an abstract. As skimmed through the Journal of the Association for the History and Computing, I noticed some of the articles had abstracts and all the articles were divided into sections. This organization made the articles easy to look through and get the main gist. However, the way the articles are set up seems so regiment. One of things I enjoy about online works do is get away from the regiment of standard scholarship.
March 7th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
I liked Thurston’s footnoting and anchor tags are great, but I wish there were a way to do it that was a little less cumbersome. Maybe my real problem is that I hate frames with a passion, but either way, I hope that a better and easier way will be developed some day.