Preface

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HTML serves up digital texts

Note: the original version of this text was authored in Adobe Framemaker, and delivered on CD-ROM via Acrobat. This version offered a greater range of capabilities than that, pioneering effort (the first such text from UC Santa Barbara).

As you are reading this through your browser, you have already crossed a threshold from the written page to whatever will come next, currently the screen on a monitor on your desk, but soon a pocket viewer as thin as a piece of note card, unfolding to the size of a sheet of music, which reflects an image from a thimble-sized projector. Becoming “multimedia ready” in order to view and hear what is on this screen may have been difficult and expensive in time and funds, but soon this capacity will be built-in to many devices and academic training from kindergarten, and will become as cheap as a well-bound book. But whatever the future holds on the digital front, you are experiencing one of its beginnings. And as a beginning, this project stumbles where others will later be nimble, and its grasp is far less now than will be possible even six months hence.

Most of the problems of “authoring” this text are the same as those that have challenged ethnographers for decades: finding a problem in the field that illuminates a larger cultural/social concern; developing a rapport with the group where the practices under study occur; thickening the description of the circumstances of the situation to situate the practice in a manner that informs how and why and where this occurs; and then bringing all of these materials back to a room where they are transcribed, translated and transcoded for use; and finally sitting down to write the thing. These are the core tasks of ethnography that, I trust, are well displayed in what follows. But in what follows there is also something else, something novel in both form and content, something that, in its nascent outline, leads us to a new manner of ethnography.