Anthropological Multimedia revived 2021

The following texts have been made available online in 2021 to facilitate access after being inaccessible for an unknown number of years. Links to external sites have not been updated so will not work. DZ for the editors.

Anthropological Multimedia {originally 1994 with later amendments}

An experiment in evolving document structure and multi-authorship

Table of contents

Click on the titles below to read the elements of the document so far; use your WWW browser's navigation features to return to this page to read the other elements.

1. Marcus Banks 'Interactive multimedia and anthropology: a sceptical view' (June 1994)
   Marcus Banks PDF version 'Interactive multimedia and anthropology: a sceptical view' (June 1994)

2. Peter Biella 'Codifications of ethnography: linear and nonlinear' (November 1994)
   Local (Oxford) copy 'Codifications of ethnography: linear and nonlinear' (November 1994)

About the project

The place of multimedia within social anthropological teaching and research is one of today's hot topics. While a number of applied projects are underway, there has been less discussion of the implications of such developments. We have decided to conduct an experiment in electronic publishing on the Web to create an on-going multi-authored document structure that will examine the theoretical issues involved.

In early June 1994 Marcus Banks (Oxford) presented a paper on the topic at a conference on 'Interactive Multimedia and Anthropology' [University of the West of England (Bristol), organized by Richard Thorn (UWE), Dan Marks and André Singer (both Café Productions)].

A version of the paper was published on the Oxford RSL/Bodleian Library WWW server shortly afterwards, and attracted the attention of Peter Biella (University of Southern California) who wrote a critical reply and placed it on the USC E-LAB server.

This page provides links to these two documents and will link any further directly related documents.

We are interested in inviting further comments and related documents to contribute to this evolving debate. The only stipulations are that comments and documents should continue the debate begun by Marcus Banks and Peter Biella, that they should be primarily theoretical (and not, for example, discussions of projects), and that they should retain an anthropological focus.

You can contribute to this evolving document structure in one of two ways:

• By creating your own hypertextual document, placing it on your local server and notifying us of the URL so that we can incorporate the link on this page; you should also place a link to this document in your own document

• By sending us shorter comments by email or by filling in a comments form; we will then create a new WWW document and link it to this page.

We cannot promise space on our servers to publish all documents received by the second route, and we reserve the right not to incorporate any document we receive or are informed of by either route.

Marcus Banks or

A later paper

1. Marcus Banks Time-consuming Technologies: using the Web and visual media in anthropological teaching and research (November 1998)

Early access instructions

For the record the following are the original access instructions

The document is called 'Interactive multimedia and anthropology - a sceptical view'. It has been lodged in the anthropology sections of an Oxford Gopher server and an Oxford World-Wide Web (W3) server - both based at the Radcliffe Science Library.

To reach the Gopher version point your Gopher client to
rsl.ox.ac.uk (Port 70) and then look in the directory 'Archaeology
and Anthropology Corner'. For the more technically-minded, the instructions are

There is also a URL: gopher://gopher.rsl.ox.ac.uk:70/11/anthro-corn

To reach the W3 version (which is just the same, though the footnotes have hypertextual links) the URL is:

http://www.rsl.ox.ac.uk/isca/index.html

Alternatively, just browse around in familiar anthropological areas of Gopher or W3 and you should eventually come across links to the Oxford servers!