Plates in Miller and Slater revisited
Posted on December 13, 2001 @ 10:11 in Research
I complained the other day about the fact that Miller and Slater in their book The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach refer to plates/illustrations that are not reprinted in the book, but are located on an accompanying website. To be fair, a lot of the illustrations they use actually are complete websites and they've done a good job in archiving those websites, keeping most of the depth and interactivity of those sites intact. I don't think that these sites could have been adequately reproduced in the book and apart from including a cd-rom with the book, setting up a site next to or in addition to the book, like Miller and Slater did, is the most practical way to reproduce this kind of material. Nevertheless, it's annoying to have to switch between two very different media, assuming that I'm reading the book near a computer with internet access in the first place.
Any simple solutions that I can think of? Not immediately. What might have worked, is treating the website not so much as an illustrations repository for the book, but more as a work by itself, next to the book. More text, explanation and analysis on the site, so that going through the site would yield the reader more information, more insights, while only reading the book would still yield a satisfying image of the study. That would also mean, I think, that the book would have to make less explicit references to the illustrations on the site, but the authors could compensate by including more descriptions and/or some static reproductions of salient features of certain important websites.
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