Stone: Form and Content in Web-Based Anthropology

Although it is rapidly emerging as a forum for social science scholarship, the Worldwide Web is now used mainly to propagate conventional scholarship. This is certain to change, given the simultaneous expansion in the capabilities of web-based communication and decline in libraries' ability to keep abreast of print scholarship. This article outlines opportunities for changing and enhancing the nature of the scholarly (peer-reviewed) articles on the web. Three mechanisms are discussed by which the form and content of the scholarly article can be improved: (1) the use of hypertext structuring, (2) the integration of multimedia components into articles, and (3) the use of differentiated pointers. Examples are on an accompanying web page at http://artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/demo/. Invent the motion picture, Marshall McLuhan wrote, and the first thing thought to do is to put on a play and film it. It is only much later that the possibilities of motion picture technology become clear beyond a single theater with a single batch of sets and actors. This is an apt metaphor for social science and the Worldwide Web (hereafter, "the web"). Social science scholarship is well represented on the web; most journals have web "shopfronts" with tables of contents and information for authors, some now have full text of articles, and some journals exist only online.(1) In the overwhelming majority of cases, this new medium is used to propagate scholarship differing little or not at all in form from conventional printed work. Yet web-based scholarship provides opportunities for qualitatively different kinds of scholarly products, embodying enhancements that range from the convenient to the revolutionary. The arrival of this new medium happens to coincide with a dramatic drop in the ability of research libraries to keep abreast of print publications. The experience of the Washington University library is typical for a research university: over the past decade, annual expenditures on print based journals more than doubled, while the actual number of titles in the collection fell by almost five percent. The number of scholarly books published by university presses is dropping sharply in large part due to academic libraries' ongoing inability to pay for their existing subscriptions. While existing print collections will continue to be important to researchers, and while such collections will continue to grow for the indefinite future, web based scholarship represents the future for both scholars and libraries. This paper examines some of the implications of this for the form and content of peerreviewed scholarly publications. I include examples of html (Hypertext Markup Language) for implementing some of what I describe. Although this is not a how-to guide, it at least indicates what is involved, and provides a starting point for those interested in developing Stone: Form and Content in Web-Based Anthropology file:///C|/Users/amybaker/Desktop/Stone_%20Form%20and%20Content%20in%20Web-Based%20Anthropology.html[6/24/2015 11:18:59 AM] web-based papers. The particular vantage point is that of an anthropologist, but the discussion is mostly applicable to other social sciences as well. Hypertext Hypertext literally means "text above." It is used for various aspects of information management, but its signal function is to refer, or "link," one document to another. Hypertext linkage of documents is not new; the seminal formulation was Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, "As We May Think." In this visionary description of an online text and graphics system, Bush anticipated the information explosion of decades later. He did not, however, anticipate the computer revolution, relying instead on microfilm and photocells (the only "computer" in 1945 was the Army's "ENIAC," a baroque colossus of 20,000 tubes incapable of storing a program). Hypertext has been an issue of continuing interest to information theorists (Englebart, 1963; Nelson, 1980) but the past 5 years has seen a virtual explosion of hypertextbased information. This is because hypertext is the principal concept of the web; the protocol used in displaying pages is Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) and the set of tags used in designing pages is Hypertext Markup Language (html). Html controls appearance and behavior of the web document, but more importantly it controls the structure of a scholarly display by controlling linkages among files. Where a "link" is indicated, a mouse click connects the reader to an address containing text, a program, an image (still or moving), a sound recording, or a separate web site. The reader may then retreat to the same place in the original text and continue reading. Although hypertext may be designed to lead the reader along a linear path, its distinctive strength is the capacity to offer multiple readings. As Bush anticipated, such link-based structure has enormous potential for scholarship. It will be useful to give a cursory description of what is involved in creating web documents, and to clarify web-related terminology. A server is a computer that provides some service for other computers connected to it via a network. Our concern here is with web servers, computers that can be reached via the internet. A web page, or web site, consists of one or (usually) more computer files, residing on a server, and capable of being displayed by browser programs such as Netscape and Internet Explorer. Each file has a unique address consisting of its domain name, directory, and filename; when preceded by the name of a protocol, this address becomes a "URL" or Uniform Resource Locator. (The protocol for web documents is the familiar "http://"; others include "ftp://", "telnet://", and "Mailto:".) Some of these files contain programs or digitized sounds or images, but the key to the web are files containing plain text. Within a plain text file there may be content (words to be displayed on the reader's screen) and html. Html consists of "tags" enclosed in . A complete tag generally includes a start and stop command; for instance, the word "hello" is italicized by