Preface— making a digital text

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One of the “moments” of my fieldwork in Kyoto was the use of my interest in the festival community by the community to achieve publicity for the event: in this case as a feature news story on the Osaka evening news (Yomiuri TV). At the same time, I was also performing a part within the festival drama —a part that had been written for me, in which I played myself as a visual anthropologist always sticking the lens of my video camera into spaces and rehearsal zones where it is not entirely welcome. This sort of interaction would be very difficult to explain without the use of the original video. [SEE: Video Below].

Knowing that my work relied on the use of visual material, and that the reader should have control over this material, I decided to make a digital text. At first, I was thinking only of a book with videos where photographs would have been placed.

Had I stayed in that idea, I would have simply used the digital capabilities of this text to mimic the written, paper form, with a few added “bells-and-whistles.” But somewhere in the middle of this project, I began to ask myself about the potential for a new form of writing—a text as different as it need be to express what is available from within the digital mode of textual production. No longer asking how the text attaches to the older, paper, mode, I searched for its own logic. By this, I opened the digital box, and out jumped this website.

Actually, nothing about this project jumped out on its own. Most of what you see below is several generations of design away from the original design notion, and the final version became possible only in February of 1997, because of a radical advance in Adobe Acrobat™. Choices in font and color, page layout and text organization were all improved during this process. Meanwhile, the World Wide Web (WWW) continued to grow in content and capabilities, and the text acquired the capability to connect directly to this. Today, we are almost to the point where field-sites and web-sites will both be required spaces for all new urban ethnographic work.

But the main difference in this text (from the one that was printed out on paper for a library that is only now beginning to consider digital texts) is that the linear order of argumentation used by printed texts no longer applies here.

The central text has been pared down to its essential arguments and ethnographic materials, much of which are presented in the form of video and visual materials, which the reader must acquire much as a sociologist or anthropologist would in the field: where ever possible I have avoided the temptation to provide video and then to also narrate an authoritative version of this. In fact, there are times when I provide visual and audio information with no other description, in order to allow the reader to experience this as a direct form of communication, an experience to which the reader’s attention will need to return at a later time. Such “loops” between the video and photographic information and the text demonstrate a more general feature of this, and all digital texts: the use of links between multiple texts.

For example, “hyper-links” embedded in the central text allow the reader to access whole collections of supplemental texts, looping between the main arguments and supporting materials that range from empirical findings and literary references, to theoretical essays, and other helpful (so it is hoped) commentaries. The central text occupies only a portion of the several hundred pages of this document. This text allows a reader to scan the main arguments and note the presence of other materials available at the “click” of a mouse-button. Should a topic be of special interest to the reader, s/he will find that the text will open up onto a range of connected notions and resources. Otherwise, the reader can continue on at pace, through the main text.

The theoretical statements are presented through a collection of short essays that are held in what I call the “Commentarium." These statements are called when appropriate by the central text that supports them and moves the central argument forward. There is no linear order to the essays within the commentarium: it would make no sense to try to read these together as a text. At the same time, it would make little sense to read the entire main text without occasionally referencing the commentarium as these links appear.

The commentarium provides a set of fasteners (nails, screws, glue) and the main text a supply of structural materials (boards, bricks, steel rods), which, when put together in an iterative fashion, construct the arguments. Or by another, more provocative analogy, the entire text creates its own meta-language: with the main text providing the syntax, the commentarium, the semantics, and the vocabularium, specific lexical items.

The text-as-language image is useful as this presents the possibility of a fractal homology between the digital text and its iterative elements: including its linguistic form. Freed from the linear constraints of the page, the digital text may allow a more “conversational” and “dialogical” flow where the pragmatics will include a range of digitally encoded information.

The reader gains an ability to navigate a text that can include a much greater variety of source materials, and also an ability to offer direct (if infuriatingly slow today) feedback to the author via the World Wide Web. The ability to provide feedback, when readers become more comfortable with it (and as it becomes less cumbersome), will open up a second text, based on the original text, but no longer authored by the original author (also he/she might participate). Readers can talk to one another in this dialogic text. Of all the openings that the digital text provides, this is perhaps the most interesting, and fundamentally provocative one. It returns the idea of “publishing” a work to a public of readers who can bridge the divide between production and reception and add their voices to the text.

Still the challenge for the reader is to understand that a “chapter” of ten pages in the main text might also include links to fifty other pages, as well as videos to watch. At more than eight hundred standard pages and two hours of video—some of it time-lapsed for frame-by-frame viewing—there is a whole lot of material here. And since some of the essays may be called more than once (although the reader may not need to re-read these more than a couple of times to remember them) the iterative dimensions of the text may make it read much longer than a linear text.

For the digital-text reader, texts become more of a resource compendium than a text to be consumed cover-to-cover. Individual essays can be read and then tracked through links to their various applications. Videos can be viewed with an eye for selected information. Individual texts can be gathered into larger collections that are automatically indexed together to form information “oceans” on selected topics. As this is mounted on the internet, these can be referenced from anywhere on the planet. New forms of collaboration open up in the process.

The problem for the digital-text author is to gain enough of a purview of the entire field of possible information (usually this requires a small-scale research locale) to be able to generate a text that re-assembles this faithfully for the reader. This is similar to the need for “thick description” within written ethnographies, but this task is complicated by the availability of visual and audio information. Everything just gets that much thicker.