potential unfolding

This past week (May 26-30), I had the luxury of attending the Sophie workshop at the University of Southern California (USC) put on by the Institute for the Future of the Book (IF:Book) and the Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML) at USC. The workshop was designed to familiarize us with the various operative capabilities of the Sophie program, and as I interacted with the medium and conversed with others in the workshop, I started to see a potential bridge between the “adherence to text” (nearly at all cost) that we see in traditional scholarship and a future of predominantly multimedia scholarship, and I can’t stress enough the importance of this potential.

With any change, paradigmatic, social, cultural, there is a person, entity, or thing that resides, even if only marginally, in a multitude of worlds, and Sophie may be that for the future of scholarship, and its institute: the 21^st century University. One of the areas of resistance normally attributed to multimedia creations and their lack of “scholarship” comes from various tenure-review faculty not knowing how to judge the material, which can be as much of there not being clearly defined guides to addressing this kind of scholarship as it is a matter of the work not looking or feeling like scholarship, like scholarship they are familiar with. But with Sophie, the author/creator could, though by no means is required to, mimic the style, format, or flow of a “traditional” print-based text [image1 below] From this, he or she could then add illustrative movie clips or sounds or even add explanatory pop-ups that function somewhere between footnotes and hyperlinks. [image2 below].

This, of course, is one take of Sophie, one use, and while it can be used to do much more radical things, things that push envelopes in a lot of directions [image not shown because “image” not static], without having to sacrifice the level of scholarship involved, I think for now this view of Sophie as bridge between a space of print-scholarship and a space of Moulthrop’s intervention is a great moment for beginning our potential engagement with it—especially as I intend to create a multimedia/multidimensional variation of my dissertation in Sophie, and so I will start with this base of adding complexity and media to a familiar form as a place to launch my own explorations, so as not to be dismissed, disregarded, or devalued by “traditionalists” simply because this “media” version doesn’t look or feel like scholarship.

Sophie View (ebook variety)

Sophie with video insert

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http://www.clemson.edu/~hodgson