Multimedia
After several decades of hypertext writing, we have seen many electronic alternatives to the traditional print article. in this hypertext, I will emphasize playful experiments in research reporting in electronic hypermedia.
Electronic media do not have the same limitations as print media: The length of the article may vary. An electronic journal does not have a fixed number of pages that the articles must fill. Thus, articles may include more documentation; offer the possibility of condensable work; use video, sound, and images; or they may open the database for the reader to experiment with.
Media and communications scholars often write about films and radio and television broadcasts. Musicologists write about music, dance sholars about dance, and computer game researchers about computer games. In electronic media, they may also include examples of the works they are discussing.
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As mentioned, Coover was a pioneer in including video in his social anthropolgy work Cultures in Webs. Volume 8 of Postmodern Culture was dedicated to film, and Adrian Miles, who often has included video in his work, contributed with a essay on Singin' in the Rain, where he includes small excerpts of important scenes in the movie. Andrew Morrison included many videos of artists and cultural objects in his Storyspace hypertext HyperLand.
To document their research project on dance and electonic art, Morrison together with Albertine Aaberge and Synne Skjulstad created a database of documentation video, that may be browsed and searched by the user, as well as it serves to illustrate the argument in their research writings.
In his impressive review of Espen Aarseth's Cybertext for the web journal Electronic Book Review, Nick Montfort included playable Java versions of three of the computer games Aarseth discusses, so the reader better could understand what the discussion was about.
Finally, Andrew Morrison and Even Westvang has written a hypertext essay that runs as a Flash program inside the web browser, allowing paragraphs to move around and zoom in and out according to the audience's choices.
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