The Making of the Blumenbach Website

What if researchers possessed a tool that readily allowed them to bring together text, images, video, and audio to create a single work, such as an investigation or an historical study, and then to organize this material, chameleon-like, into a rich variety of ways? And what if, when this multi-faceted “hypermedia” was ready to share, it could be published to the World Wide Web with a click of a button to make it instantly accessible around the world? Rather than a few hundred copies of a printed monograph being sold by academic publishers to libraries and a handful of interested specialists, the Website would attract several hundred visitors a week. Just as easily as creating and publishing this material, the author could make changes and revise his or her work dynamically at any time. Learning to use this tool would be easier and more intuitive than learning to use a word processor. It would be fun, creative, and would include a logical and easy-to-learn user interface. Creating the content, designing the site, and publishing it would be seamlessly integrated into the computer’s software and operating system. Long learning curves would be unnecessary, as would hefty training manuals or guides.

The Blumenbach Research Website has acted as an experiment, a test, in the digital creation of a doctoral dissertation in the humanities that was conceived and developed as a Website from its inception; the dissertation was not written as a linear monograph and then converted to the Web, but rather was designed from the ground up as a multi-media Website. The intent was also not create a PDF or other digital monograph that would be made available through the large-scale academic document servers that now exist. The objective was to assess how the latest personal computing and “Web 2.0” technologies could support the creative process in actually delivering non-linear hypermedia via the Web. Do the tools now exist that would allow the researching scholar to readily incorporate them into his or her research? Are they transparently intuitive enough to be seamlessly integrated into the creative research process?

The potential to produce and publish digital scholarship has existed with personal computers since the advent of the World Wide Web, but for a number of r

easons it has not been realized by academic researchers. Though creating text-based HTML pages is relatively simple for the Web, rich interactive multimedia Websites have only become readily possible since the advent of the “Web 2.0” era a couple of years ago. While not difficult, creating and publishing a Website has in the past been tedious, and it takes a number of discrete steps to accomplish. Scholars, immersed in their research, have understandably been unwilling to take the time to learn these steps, and most universities have not integrated Web publishing into academic life. At the same time, disseminating the results of one’s research is so inextricably entrenched into the rewards and recognition system of traditional academic publishing that the compelling advantages of making use of the Web for scholarly publishing have been neglected. In 1994, still before the World Wide Web had become well known on university campuses, I carried out an experiment in digital publishing by securing permission from my publisher to make available a pre-print of a research article I had written via FTP on the Internet. I sent an announcement of the article’s availability on a professional mailing list that included over 5000 participants.

Adding to the challenges of learning to publish to the Web has been a rapidly evolving computing environment, with ever-changing standards, technologies, and software applications. Academic computing departments have offered only intermittent and insufficient support for faculty and research-based Web publishing. Until recently, one almost needed to be an information technology specialist to publish to the Web. New software tools, however, have become available over the past couple of years to greatly facilitate the creation and publishing of richly sophisticated multimedia Websites without complex knowledge of Web technologies. As a digital library specialist, I have carefully monitored the development of Web 2.0 technologies and software applications over the past several years. In deciding which software to use to create and publish the Blumenbach Website, I evaluated a wide spectrum of software applications available for scholarly publishing.

An Obvious Solution: Evaluating the Development Software

Unlike the large-scale server-based document publishing systems such as MIT’s DSpace, I was more interested in an application or suite of applications that allowed one to create complex multimedia documents on a personal computer before publishing to the Web. Document server systems like DSpace only allow the simple uploading of specific document types like PDF or Word files, thus perpetuating the traditional linear narratives of the printing era. These services are really only document publishing systems, they do not support the actual creation and development of documents or other works; they are not authoring systems. Digital library software such as OCLC’s Content DM also has little value in supporting digital authoring. These expensive packages (as well as the complex open-source digital library software) have been developed with larger organizations like research libraries in mind, and for managing documents with sophisticated workflows in groups. In the cases in which research libraries and universities have developed on-campus publishing systems, there is little or no support for authoring and the rigid requirements for these large-scale systems act as forbidding obstacle in their being adopted by faculty. I was aware what one could do with Web-based technologies like Flash, CSS and Javascript applications in creating highly polished, professional Websites that included imaging, audio and video, and for this reason I was looking for something more than a simple document server.

At the same time, while carrying out this preliminary work on my MacBook Pro laptop, I was still unsatisfied with the steep learning curve and unnecessarily complex user interfaces of the generally available Web-authoring software (both commercial and open source). To create Flash-based Websites, for example, a lengthy period of special training has been a prerequisite, and I was aware that most academic researchers would not be willing to invest the time in learning such applications. Such applications as Flash and Dreamweaver are increasingly targeted for the growing body of professional designers who build Websites for others, and who are expected to know CSS, Javascript and other Web technologies. While carrying out this investigation, I became aware of the distinction between the actual creative process in Website design and development on the one hand, and the often laborious interaction with the computer applications to build the sites on the other. In not making this distinction, scholars and researchers often come to regard such work as tediously time-consuming, as taking away one’s time for more productive work in their respective disciplines. I realized that if an application, or suite of applications, could be found that minimized such tedium, and at the same time fostered the creative process, direct publishing of hypermedia works to the Web could become a reality.

The solution to this dilemma finally occurred to me in a place where I least expected it: right in front of me on my desk. It was an obvious solution because it was something I had been making use of all along--my Macintosh computer with its highly integrated suite of image, audio, and video applications!

Every Macintosh sold today not only includes Apple’s “Leopard” version of its powerful and elegant operating system OS X, but it also includes a rich and sophisticated suite of multimedia applications called iLife. This suite includes iWeb which, when coupled with Apple’s .mac Web publishing service, provides users with a ‘one-click’ Web publishing environment that is both powerful and easy to learn and use. Though iWeb largely relies on Javascript for building Websites, Apple used its software development magic to completely mask the complexities of language markup, Web scripting, communications protocols, and like. For the end user, iWeb possesses a “drag and drop” simplicity, it’s as easy as learning to create documents in Word. Because of its focus in providing quality computing products to the general consumer, Apple has largely marketed its iLife suite to general users. The entire package, however, beginning with the quality and elegantly designed Apple computers, continuing on with the highly integrated OS X operating system, the iLife suite of media applications, on through to the .mac Web hosting service, offers academics the potential of a sophisticated yet easy to learn and use digital work environment for managing one’s research materials and in creating complex Web 2.0 documents. The Macintosh provides the means for fostering creativity through its intuitive, unobtrusive computing environment. The entire work environment is so tightly integrated through the operating system Leopard that the experience is like using a single application to manage one’s entire body of professional or academic work. In effect, the computer slips away into the background and allows the creative professional to focus entirely on his or her work. The Macintosh/iLife work environment embodies precisely the richly sophisticated but at the same time easy to learn tools that the academic author needs to take advantage of the potential the World Wide Web has to offer.

The Blumenbach research Website ( www.blumenbach.info ) has been a means by which the latest Web 2.0 technologies can be tested for their viability in offering a truly functional solution for scholarly Web publishing. In deciding on using the ‘out-of-the-box’ software that comes with every Macintosh computer, I was also testing the viability of a readily available and inexpensive solution to complex multimedia document creation and Web publishing. Could an academic researcher use a Mac and the .mac service to create and publish sophisticated research results and other types of scholarly works? As the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding, and the Blumenbach Website is the result of this experiment. Though I also used other software at various phases of the project, for the most part everything on the Blumenbach Website was designed, built, and managed using the software that comes on every Macintosh computer. For someone who has a basic understanding of the Macintosh operating system, learning to create a Website with the professional polish and rich multimedia of the Blumenbach site would not take more than one or two workshop sessions. It really is that easy.

Beyond Web Publishing: Transforming the Document Creation Process

Since the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century, authors have been writers, they grasped and formulated their ideas as a sequence of linear ideas that were then laboriously transposed to paper with quill, pen, or other writing instrument. Since ideas are so richly multifaceted, with ‘threads of thought’ and ‘lines of thinking’ interacting in a complex network of associations, our ideas undergo a radical translation, or conversion, into a much more uni-dimensional, linear narrative that can then be written down and set to printed text. Even in the 20th century, in the era of the typewriter, many, if not most, authors first composed their thoughts using paper and pen or pencil.

The struggle that has been part of the process of conversion has led to some of man’s greatest artistic works of world literature, but this does not change the constrained relationship between thought and the printed word.

Researchers in the sciences and humanities are seldom aware of the often wide disparity between the ideas or research they would like to share on the one hand, and the actual means by which they are expressed as a publication on the other. Throughout the 20th century the mechanisms for disseminating the results of one’s research have largely remained stable, with improvements in technology creating efficiencies of scale rather than any significant changes in the published works themselves. At one end of the information producing spectrum there is the practicing scholar or researcher who primarily prepared his or her work for publication by means of a typewriter, with the first years of the 20th century still making use of the pen and the latter years witnessing the introduction and growing use of the personal computer. With the advent of the 21st century we continue to employ the personal computer as not much more than a high-tech typewriter, rather than exploit its potential as a transformative technology for information production and dissemination.

In a similar manner, scholars and researchers are seldom consciously aware of the degree to which a pen, typewriter, or computer conditions the production of their ideas. The manuscript

page at the left is from Alexander von Humboldt’s great magnum opus Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung (Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe), a monumental work that encompasses the accumulated thinking of Humboldt’s long career as a scientist. The scribblings on the manuscript pages of Kosmos (click on the image to bring up a full-sized reproduction), often difficult to decipher, sometimes unreadable, were those used by the printer who manually set the type for the printed publication. It is difficult for us to imagine the inscrutable work behind the typesetting of the several hundred pages that made up the book. We rarely think about what goes into the making of a book, and as much as Gutenberg’s printing press inaugurated a profoundly sweeping transformation in European society, printing was a painfully tedious occupation. Even in the era of the typewriter, the laborious process of typesetting a manuscript of several hundred pages was both a costly and exacting task. The steps from an author’s manuscript to composing the text by the printer are fraught with dangers in correctly setting the text of a manuscript, and we know of countless occasions in which significant works of world literature have come down to us with such errors.

An entire realm of scholarship exists to research the ‘versions’ history of Shakespeare’s works, and the same is true for a number of other prominent authors. The printing press was a radical step forward in communications technology, but in the end it was still a relatively primitive way to express and transmit one’s ideas.

What was Humboldt thinking when he penned the words found on the manuscript pages of Kosmos? We know that he had been working with the ideas that made it into the book for several decades, and we can be certain that he had taken careful notes over the years. In Humboldt’s day, paper was relatively expensive, and an author carefully formulated his or her thoughts before putting them to paper. Unlike with the use of a computer, there was no way to test a thought by manifesting or ‘externalizing’ it in a Word document, to step back and reflect on it, and then to perhaps rework it or revise it. As with all other authors of the printing era, Humboldt had to ‘translate’ the rich, multifaceted nature of human thought and compose his ideas in a linear narrative for his book.

What if the scholar vastly expanded his or her means for expressing ideas? What if he or she was able to break out o

f the the linear way of thinking practiced at least since Gutenberg, and to develop a more direct means to communicate the richly visual and ‘hypertext’ nature of human thought? The idea is not new, and innovative attempts to recreate complex thought as a form of communication have been attempted in the past. More recently, for example, academics frequently present their research at conferences through “poster sessions”. At these sessions, which typically are held in a prominent area of the conference to attract interest, researchers will set up an exhibit that concisely summarizes their work in an informal and interesting manner. They’re given a table, and a large board or poster is mounted unto the table that is used to characterize the academic’s research in as creative and visual manner as possible. What these poster sessions represent, in effect, is an attempt to create a concrete visualization of a researcher’s thinking. The square poster format forces the scholar to break out of linear thinking and to create a narrative that is more visual and multi-faceted, indeed more like we really think.

Web-Authoring Software To Support the Creative Process

The notion that systems of communication and the means to share information could be developed that both supported and more closely resembled our thinking was most dramatically outlined by the American scientist Vannevar Bush in, remarkably, the 1930s. Though written several decades before the Web, his now famous essay “As We May Think” described a ‘memex’ system that acted as an external support device for our memory, in effect an externalization of our memory. If this sounds eerily like what the World Wide Web has become, there is indeed a direct connection, since several information scientists of Bush’s generation took his ideas and began to develop the technologies that would later become the World Wide Web. Though Bush based his system on the latest microfilm technologies of the time, the fundamental concepts, such as hypertext, were later used in the creation of the basic infrastructure for the World Wide Web. Bush prophetically imagined a kind of scholar’s workstation that would both mechanically transmit and deliver information as needed. In developing these ideas, Bush recognized that ergonomics, simplicity, and immediacy were critical to effective scientific research. The system had to be flexible enough to facilitate our thinking and communication processes. It needed to be a system that quickly permitted the researcher to both retrieve and submit new information to the system. He spoke explicitly of “wholly new forms of encyclopedias”, thus anticipating the appearance of such resources as Wikipedia, “with a mesh of associative trails running through them,” that is, fully hypertext-capable.

The Web has introduced a radical transformation in sharing knowledge, a transformation that has not been experienced since Gutenberg, but we are still bound by the inflexibly rigid forms of linear thinking that dominated the age of the printing press. Until now it has been largely information professionals that have developed the Web and how content is structured and delivered. Authors must break out beyond the boundaries of linear narrative text and instead become

creators of much more richly visual and multifaceted works, works that reflect the way we think. In so doing the Web will not only continue to function as a vehicle for transmitting and sharing knowledge, it will also increasingly become an essential part of the creative process itself, just as writing has been integral to thinking over the past several centuries.

Thinking, and the means by which it is transformed into a creative work for others, are subtle and complex phenomena. The thinking activity that incrementally leads to an externalized product in the form of, in this example, a Website is the result of much intellectual effort based on a sequence of related insights. We are always working with, reshaping, and recasting the ideas of others, but in the end it becomes something new that in turn can also be shared. What is necessary to make the World Wide Web a tool that supports the creative activity of the academic, of the researching scholar, is an authoring tool that takes full advantage of the hypertexting multimedia capabilities of the Web. This authoring environment needs to be intuitive and easy-to-use without the demands of the computer constantly intruding (viruses, buggy software, etc.), and it needs to be malleable enough to freely permit the researcher to produce works that accurately reflect his or her ideas. In other words, it should be a publishing tool that does not require the researcher to ‘convert’ the multifaceted nature of one’s ideas into a linear narrative. This tool should not only enable the direct transfer of ideas to the Web (whether in visual, audio, or textual form), it should actually act as a catalyst in sparking one’s interest or curiosity relating to the material one is working with. Lara Delage-Toriel, a professor of English at the University of Strasbourg in France, recounts how she could detect just this process of transforming visual thinking in Nabokov’s novels, how he was able to develop pictorial images into the narrative of his text. We know from his manuscripts that the process of converting Nabokov’s “luminious” mental images into text was indeed an arduous one.

In 1990 I acquired a NeXT Workstation, the

same type that Tim Berners-Lee used to develop the World Wide Web. Founded and led by Steven Jobs, NeXT Computer would later be purchased by Apple and the NeXTStep operating system would go on to form the basis of Mac OS X. The NeXT was way ahead of its time, with Jobs employing the principles behind the Macintosh computer and taking them to the next level with the new NeXT. It was a phenomenal computer to own at a time when Windows 95 was still five years away. What made it so special was not any kind of arcane complexity, but rather its engineering elegance and utter simplicity in use. Already, at that early time, the computer slipped into the background and allowed me to focus entirely on the creative process and on my work. The secret to the optimal scholar’s workstation was not a difficult one: to maximize creative work while keeping the user experience simple and transparent, but it’s a lesson the computer industry as a whole is still clearly struggling with.

The Creation of the Blumenbach Website

The creation and development of a doctoral dissertation intended from the beginning as a Website opens up a broad range of possibilities in the transmission of scholarly ideas. Like the poster sessions held at conferences, such a dissertation would be designed in a hypertext and hypermedia manner with the Website as the target publication. This is in stark contrast to writing a dissertation in the traditional manner as a continuous narrative, which is then ‘published’ to a Web database as a PDF file. Rather, the graduate student creating such a Web-based dissertation can think and carry out research in terms of the capabilities inherent in using the Web. In this way the Web both fosters and supports the creative bringing together and production of one’s research.

The Blumenbach Website was largely created using an Apple MacBook Pro and iLife, the standard suite of software that is included with every Macintosh computer. The actual site was designed and managed in iWeb, the Web design application found in iLife, and it is hosted through Apple’s .mac service. Images were edited and organized in iPhoto, and the ‘e-books’ are published as page images through .mac’s Web Gallery.

A new Web document hosting service called Scribd was introduced during the writing of the dissertation, and I will be investigating the use of this service for the Website’s primary source material. Though professional software such as Adobe CS3, OmniPage, and Aperture were used for some development work, an important objective in producing this Website was to demonstrate that professional academic publishing can be achieved with standard, off-the-shelf software that is included with every Macintosh computer. Learning to use this software is no more complex than learning a standard word-processing or image-editing program, indeed Apple’s iLife software is intended for home and family use. The simplicity of this software does not mean that it lacks in power or functionality, however, as one can see from the Blumenbach Website. Apple’s target-marketing centering around home and family use should not deter the serious use of iLife on college campuses. The iLife application GarageBand, for example, may at first glance appear to be a hobby software for teens, but it shares the same features as other Apple software in being both deceptively powerful and easy-to-use. GarageBand is a full-featured audio recording software that can be used for recording live music on through to creating podcasts or Web-based lectures. As with iPhoto and the other iLife applications, GarageBand is tightly integrated into the Leopard operating system and, most importantly, iWeb. This integration is key to the success of making use of a Mac for fully supporting a researcher’s creative activity and seamlessly publishing it on the Web. In effect, the entire Leopard operating system and iLife function as a single multifaceted application, since they all share the same user interface features a

nd data can be shared from application to application. This means that I can make a professional-quality audio recording--a reading from a Blumenbach text, for example--and literally publish it to the Blumenbach Website with a couple of keystrokes.

Once a researcher becomes a versed user of the Leopard operating system, all of the various components of the Mac working environment come together to create a powerfully intuitive support infrastructure for one’s research and writing or document creation. One increasingly finds oneself considering various options for expressing ideas: “Oh, I think this would work best as a video...” or: “A series of pop-up hyperlinked images would work best for this idea”, and so on.

The Macintosh can also act as a massive organizer, a manager, for one’s entire body of research as well. The Leopard file system and its corresponding suite of support utilities make working with one’s data simple and intuitive. For my dissertation I had collected and effectively managed over 25GB of data, both primary and secondary source material, on my MacBook Pro’s hard drive, all in all several thousand files. In a paper environment this would have been extremely challenging for one person to manage and keep under intellectual control, but digitally it was very simple. Much of the data was collected from the Internet, but much of it was also digitized using scanners or digital cameras (which were used in libraries instead of photocopying material). The files were organized in folders and subfolders, and a linked bibliography was kept using Endnote. Everything was searchable using Leopard’s Spotlight search utility, which is very effective. This meant that virtually all of my research material was literally a couple of keystrokes away; no longer did I have to spend significant amounts of time looking for needed quotations or other research. Unlike the situation in which most of one’s research is in paper format while one is at the same time working with a computer, I did not have to convert the data I used for the dissertation itself since it was already in digital form. With the Internet providing access to increasing amounts of scholarly research, I was able to combine my collected research material on my hard drive with the Internet to provide a comprehensive work environment for writing the dissertation. Because all of this data was on a MacBook Pro, it was also mobile: I could literally take everything with me as I worked, whether it was the local coffee shop for a change of scenery, a quick trip to the library, or an extended stay at a research center. This work could then be integrated immediately into the Web-based dissertation and evaluated. This significantly compressed the time needed to carry out research and to develop the site. Writing this dissertation ten years ago would have taken several times as long as today.

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From Idea... to Website

Main Components of the Scholar’s Workstation used for the Blumenbach Project

Hardware

-MacBook Pro with 23” Cinema Display and 500 GB external hard drive
-Sony Vaio Windows Vista Ultimate Workstation
-Time Capsule-based wireless network with additional external hard drive
-Epson Photo R1800 wide-carriage printer (wireless using Airport Extreme)
-HP LaserJet printer (wireless)
-Brother Multifunction Workstation
-Canon 8800F flatbed scanner
-Blue Snoball USB microphone (for audio recording)
-Nikon D50 Digital SLR Camera with Nikkor Zoom Lens and close-up lens
-Panasonic AVCHD flashdrive video camera

Software

- iLife 08
- iWork 08
- Adobe CS3 Design Premium
- Mind Manager
- Endnote
- Filemaker Advanced 8.5
- Journler

Useful Links

Manuscript Page From Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos

The NeXT Computer Used to Develop the World Wide Web

MIT’s Stata Center

Apple MacBook Pro

“Linear Thinking”

“Visual Hypertext”

The NeXT Computer (1990):
A Transformational Desktop Workstation

The iLife Suite of Applications

The top-level folder structure for the research material gathered for the Blumenbach dissertation and Website. These folders contain over 25 gigabytes of data.