Technologies of representation are not just instruments of recording and reporting. Their basic attributes determine what it is actually possible to conceptualise, capture and articulate. Photography, to take a classic example, transformed people’s outlook on the world because it could provide an unrivalled visual framing of actuality. It had no equivalent in the prior traditions of visual communication. Technological invention spurs social change. By focussing on ‘technologies of representation’ I am not only concerned with the technological means that underpin specific forms of representation, although these fundamentally define the range of options available, but also with the ways of seeing and understanding that they open up. Tomas describes these beautifully as “a new type of amniotic environment for vision”.
Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), a landmark text written nearly a decade ago, set out to investigate the potential for interactive story forms at a time when digital interactivity was, for the first time, in the hands of the mainstream. Her book, which analyses a range of non-linear narrative models, continues to inspire those who wish to imagine the future of digital narrative textuality. The study of interactive narrative is now a vast field in its own right. Today there is extensive, vibrant debate on the evolution of digital narrative story forms, with theoretical commentary coming from perspectives as diverse as new media theory, literary studies, cinema studies, media arts and humanities computing.
In this paper I discuss broad concepts that are at the centre of debates in the digital history field. The discussion ranges over four key concepts: digital interactivity, narrative, content and form. Digital interactivity is a shifting concept, the changes in its meaning directed by technological change. Narrative, which continues to be the primary mode for the telling of history, is gaining new meanings as interactive modes prompt the question of what can be considered ‘narrative’ and what cannot. Particular kinds of historical content lend themselves more readily to interactive representation, but to discuss this is to acknowledge that what counts as ‘history’ has been expanded immeasurably over the past decades. Finally, the many hybrid forms being utilised in the digital history field requires that new critical frameworks be developed to help theorise and differentiate those forms.
Paul Arthur is Vice-Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow and Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. He speaks and publishes widely on major challenges and changes facing 21st-century society, from the global impacts of technology on communication, culture and identity
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