In this article Gregory Crane examines the ways in which the capabilities of a particular medium--print, sound and video recordings, electronic text--determine the questions readers ask and the issues they decide to pursue. Printed text, Crane asserts, has as one of its chief sources of authority the "tyranny of tedium," which has effectively circumscribed the intellectual range of scholarly enquiry. Use of audio-visual information would expand this range, but scholars resist it as a new and unfamiliar medium that is difficult to cite. Crane draws on his own experience with students using the Perseus multimedia database ("Interactive Sources and Studies on Ancient Greece"), arguing that readers quickly adapt to the capabilities of a new medium, probing new areas and making connections not possible (or likely) through print resources. The case Crane makes for hypertext overlaps in many respects with that made by George P. Landow in Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992). For those who have read Landow, the primary interest of Crane's article might be in the application of hypertext in the social sciences, specifically in the creation of ethnographies, and in Crane's distinction between "writing culture" and "composing culture." (Sarah Wadsworth.)
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Michael Hancher

Department of English, University of Minnesota

URL: http://umn.edu/home/mh/ebibsw2.html

Comments to: mh@umn.edu

Created 29 April 1995

Last revised 17 September 1996