Bob Wyman has some thoughts on how the read/write web was lost :

The same dynamics of “concept editing” that occurred with TBL’s Web and in the reaction to my own Memex project is actually fairly common in the software business. (I will, however, spare you by not documenting other obvious examples.) Typically, those who first work on an idea or concept will see that it has a very wide scope of application, however, they are almost always forced to focus on one or another specific, limited scopes in order to present their idea in a relevant fashion to potential adopters who have specific issues addressed by the innovation. Often, in the process of this focused positioning to convince early-adopters to accept an idea or process, much of the full richness of the vision is lost or put aside. The cost of acceptance is thus often the loss of very important, even essential, elements of the vision. Sometimes, the loss is permanent and only the original thinker knows what paths were not traveled… Sometimes, the loss is temporary as others eventually re-discover the lost facets or the original visionaries are able to eventually find a means to get others to understand more of the full vision. This re-discovery of the original vision’s depth and breadth is hopefully what we see happening on the Web today as Blogging, Wikis and other read/write tools resurrect the original idea of the read/write Web.

It brings to mind how some librarians often assume that a library’s web site should conform to a certain structure, a form that simply was created in the mid-1990s. A form that now may even be outdated in terms of the Web services that people need from a library.

I’m also reminded of my own initial perspective of a “home page” back when I first starting using XMosaic in 1993. Then, I thought that a home page was simply each user’s own web page that he/she created for himself with links and other relevant information. Later, after seeing what most people and organizations were doing with their home pages, I came to realize that the accepted definition of a home page was something that was created for others and not for oneself. In many ways, the blogs of today with their journal entries and blogrolls are much more like the home page concept that I had imagined when I first started using the graphical web.

If I were looking for a PhD program, I would want it to include a serious component on digital scholarship in the humanities, new media, or something along those lines…..Matt Kirschenbaum lists some of the PhD programs relating to digital humanities but also points out the importance of possibly pursuing a PhD in a traditional field such as English: “Many humanities departments may be nervous about hiring people with new-fangled interdisciplinary degrees. That’s not intended as an absolute red flag, but before you enroll in a brand-new Ph.D. program in a field that didn’t exist ten years ago you should ask for some straight talk about the program’s placement strategy.”

Matt’s post is also a good and brief overview of humanities programs, particularly in English, that are doing innovative things digitally. Those institutions and their faculty are worth observing. There also are some good points listed in the comments to Matt’s post, so be sure to read those, too.

A really excellent example of the use of Flash technology in higher education is Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan developed at Bowdoin College. In addition to Flash the site makes use of a product called Zoomify.

This particular project was developed by Bowdoin’s educational technology unit in collaboration with Asian Studies professor Tom Conlan.

While the site is an impressive achievement and certainly a job well done, the underlying technology is not really that complicated. I point that out not to lessen the work done at Bowdoin in any way but to emphasize that this kind of project can be developed at many universities.

For a long time I’ve felt that libraries have an opportunity to develop similar projects in collaboration with faculty as part of a digitizing initiatives. Sometimes I feel that libraries have gotten rather stuck with the concept of databases and generic search and retrieval interfaces and haven’t fully explored all the possibilities.

While the scrolls in this specific project are a fairly small data set, what would be really interesting is to see a Flash-based interface designed for learning that retrieves its data through ActionScript calls to an XML-backed image database. Eventually, with the massive content that already has been digitized by libraries, I suspect that we will see more robust user level interfaces to manipulate and present that data.