COMPOSING HISTORY FOR THE WEB: DIGITAL REFORMULATION OF NARRATIVE, EVIDENCE, AND CONTEXT

Abstract

I recently published A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures, a digital book that presents a new way to understand Islam. This article describes the process and conceptual work that went into designing the book's interface. It emphasizes that hypertext enabled through digital means is not intrinsically more dynamic than print since work in both forms requires equally intensive hermeneutical effort. However, the digital realm provides a more expansive spectrum of tools to formulate concepts and to build on them. Digital presentation can be integrated into processes of theorizing, describing, and advocating that form the core of scholarship in the humanities. The article focuses on three areas—narrative, evidence, and context—that are central to modern historical work. My book's interface demonstrates that web capabilities are compositional tools whose deployment should be mulled over in a manner similar to how authors treat writing and editing. Moreover, we should take account of the quotidian fact that, in our environment, information and knowledge reach us extensively via computer-based mediation. Whether in books or in articles, academic work is assimilated through piecemeal delivery rather than bound volumes. Instead of romanticizing traditional forms whose import may be diminishing, historians and other humanities scholars can create new arguments by being attentive to the web's capabilities and to the current social conditions of possibility pertaining to the circulation of knowledge. Facility with digital composition can then feed back into all forms of humanistic thinking and writing.