We see these projects as essentially twenty-first-century digital illuminations -- ones that take advantage of the existing technical possibilities of our contemporary culture to create a viewpoint -- a twenty-first-century viewpoint -- of contemporary and historical culture, from the entry point of classical works. Likewise, these classical works were themselves, at the time of their original authorship, viewpoints of then contemporary and historical culture.
It is important to note that we do not intend for these new forms of multimedia presentation to supplant the "text" -- rather, we see them as an expansion of the concept of text -- an expansion enabled by new digital technologies to transcend some of the limitations of text in print.
The Institute believes that networked digital technologies will increasingly make possible new forms of scholarly work that incorporate multiple forms of media (text, audio, video, and image) as well as hyperlinks within, between and among various resources, with the result that construction will join deconstruction as a valid form of literary criticism and comparative analysis.
The Institute further believes that these technologies will increasingly enable, encourage, or even require, group collaborative efforts -- and that this "social construction" will itself become a means of scholarly production, much like scriptoria in an earlier age. We intend the Study Place to prototype such developments.
Innovation in the way academic studies are conducted is dependent upon the recognition of distinct advantages of the novel approach. Academic scholarship requires an understanding of historical and cultural context that is often difficult to achieve using traditional text sources alone. The Study Place intends to use the new communications technologies to make available much contextualizing and orientating material, easily and directly to the reader, at the time and place of its need.