Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society

Online Discussion Archive: Topic and Reply 5

   Topic: Computer presentation of Darnton Article

   Conf: Discussion of Darnton's Article

   From: Robert Litchfield robert_litchfield@brown.edu

   Date: Monday, March 27, 2000 02:12 PM

   

   Since I am familiar with the argument (and indeed some of the

   evidence) of Darnton's address through reading his earlier work, I

   will focus on the computer presentation (which other commentators have

   not mentioned). I am aware of the AHA/Mellon-funded Gutenberg-e

   project and was interested to view the article in computer format to

   see how the Gutenberg-e publications might turn out.



   To begin with, I was disappointed that I could not print out the text,

   since reading from text printed onto paper is my normal mode of

   reading. (By exercising patience, I was able to copy the text--though

   not the footnotes--into Microsoft Word, and thus to read the text in

   the usual way.) But I notice that with the Stephen King novella

   published electronically that was being discussed last week, you

   apparently can't print out the text either, so I may have to give in

   on this point. I did like the songs. I thought those were the only

   really new thing about the article. And I liked the map, and the

   reportage of gossip, too.



   But I didn't think all the parts of the text-package were put together

   too well. Why couldn't one get directly to the gossip reported from

   *that* caf³ by clicking on the number on the map rather than by

   looking at a separate file with all the gossip from all the caf³s? I

   am not sure I thought the map added all that much, the locations of

   the gossip didn't seem to have anything to do with the argument of the

   article. Similarly, why couldn't you hear the song being referred to

   by just clicking on a footnote or phrase in the text?



   But I thought the songs were good, and I hope this experiment

   forecasts a new stage in history where one can make use of maps,

   illustrations, data files, even songs, easily, which publishers are

   usually unwilling to include in book publications because their

   publication in print is too expensive.



   R. Burr Litchfield, Professor of History, Brown University.

   

   Topic: Re: Computer presentation of Darnton Article

   Conf: Discussion of Darnton's Article

   From: Robert Darnton darnton@princeton.edu

   Date: Tuesday, March 28, 2000 02:20 PM

   

   Other readers have echoed Burr Litchfield's frustration about the

   difficulty of printing out pages, although the footnotes are easily

   accessible from a separate file available from the site index. Perhaps

   the _American Historical Review_ can find a way around this and other

   problems in the future. In general, however, I think the team at the

   _AHR_ did a remarkable job of combining textual, visual, and audio

   material. To follow the narrative of the police investigation of the

   songs, then to see their texts, and finally to hear them is, in my

   view, a remarkable new way of taking in a historical argument. In the

   case of the caf³ gossip, the argument concerned an overall change of

   tone in the way people talked about the king, his mistresses, and his

   ministers. It was not an argument about a correlation between

   particular remarks and particular caf³s, although a careful reading of

   the extensive excerpts from the police reports would show that the

   talk tended to be more outspoken in certain places, like the Caf³

   Coton. By showing how the caf³s were scattered across a vast stretch

   of urban territory between the Bastille and the Tuileries Palace, the

   map illustrates the extent of the political talk and pinpoints its

   sites. It also gives the reader an opportunity to stroll imaginatively

   through the streets of Paris and to listen in on conversations in one

   caf³ after another. The mapping makes the process of visualization

   feasible, because the Plan Turgot depicts all the houses in all the

   neighborhoods of Paris at the time of the police reports. The

   contemporary prints reproduced in the article fill out the picture by

   illustrating the atmosphere inside the caf³s.



   Of course, the evidence should not be taken literally. Maps are

   symbolic texts, and so are copperplate engravings and musical

   annotation. Neither the maps nor the prints nor the recordings of the

   songs offer a perfect reproduction of sights and sounds that existed

   270 years ago. For my part, I still am amazed that the editors and

   research assistants at the _AHR_ and the Indiana University

   Library--Michael Grossberg, Allyn Roberts, Sean Quinlan, Jian Liu, Ann

   Bristow, and others--were able to put together such a rich combination

   of documents. Before working with them, I had no idea of how difficult

   and labor-intensive electronic publishing could be. Nor did I

   appreciate the extent to which e-articles are a collective enterprise.

   The staff of the _American Historical Review_ deserve recognition as

   co-authors of this first attempt, and I would like to thank them for

   making the first issue of the e-_AHR_ a resounding success.



   Robert Darnton

   Princeton University

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