CD-ROM Georgian Cities
Authored by the
Research Centre "Cultures Anglophones et Technologies de l'Information",
Université de Paris-Sorbonne
Published by Presses de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2001
The CD-ROM 'Georgian Cities' consists of four sections totalling about 1000 frames: London, Bath, Edinburgh and a thematic chapter on architecture, society, culture, religion. It reflects transdisciplinary approaches to urban studies: cartography, architecture, cultural life, and studies in literary and artistic images of these cities, combining documents of various types -- maps and photographs of cityscapes, paintings, literary texts, musical recordings, extracts from films on Georgian life. The documents were prepared by a team of specialists (Jacques Carr: architecture and society; Franoise Deconinck-Brossard: music and religion; Brigitte Mitchell de Soye: social life, Bath ; Marie-Hlne Thvenot-Totems: cultural life, Scottish studies), and the multimedia integration was done by the codirectors of the research centre, Liliane Gallet-Blanchard and Marie-Madeleine Martinet, demonstrating the integration of historical specialisms and computing skills.
The hypertext structure allows the user to move from one section to another: The user may for instance enter the section on Edinburgh through the homepage of the section, then moving to its subsection on daily life and furniture, which has hyperlinks to a corresponding subsection in Bath, from which navigation in any chapter on the latter city -- religion, hospitals -- is possible; the correlations between the different disciplines of cultural history is thus emphasised.
Navigation can also continue through an index, a sitemap highlighting the user's present position, a chronology, which are accessible from any page, in a navigation bar. The structure of the CD-ROM makes full use of hypermedia, and is meant to explore its potentialities in cultural history. The navigational paths correspond to the various types of contextualisation for each section, articulating social or cultural or architectural approaches : it allows the user to move through links and hot spots from maps to pictures and photographs of Georgian buildings, or from texts about music to audio extracts.
The interface options have been selected so as to reproduce eighteenth-century forms of perception: animation effects are used to illustrate a historical process such as the development of the New Town of Edinburgh, the sequential nature of narrative texts by Fielding on London, or to follow the explanation of a process (eg reconstructing the steps in plotting a perspective construction by Turner); windows can be opened by the user to suggest a change of scale in town-planning (eg map/building: from a map of Bath to the Royal Crescent, then to interior views and blown-up details); sets of alternative images can be replaced to suggest options eg of contrasting viewpoints on a cityscape -- views of Somerset House by several artists, in sections which model Georgian representational techniques, so as to enable the user to reproduce (and thus question) the ways in which the Georgian cityscape has been mediated to us in art; similarly, choices are offered between several musical tunes to accompany a picture- a Handel overture or pastoral tunes-; transition effects (eg zoom, or random effect) have been inserted to underline modes of vision -- enlargement of the field of vision in painting, digressive structure of a text by Dr Johnson or the Reverend Penrose narrating their experiences in London or Bath.
Georgian Cities is meant primarily to teach undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of eighteenth-century studies or cultural history, humanities computing and the aesthetics of hypermedia, and in interdisciplinary courses on subject-related computing skills. It also proposes an example of epistemological research in the semiotics of hypermedia presentation applied to cultural history: modelling the Georgian urban culture in the information space of electronic documents through the software functions, a topic explored in the editors' contribution to DRH 98: "The hyperspace of the Enlightenment."
Systems requirements: Windows 95 or later, 800x600 display with 65000 colours, sound card, 60 Mb of free space.
Contact: Marie-Madeleine.Martinet@paris4.sorbonne.fr or Liliane.Gallet@wanadoo.fr
The Research Centre "Cultures Anglophones et Technologies de l'Information" conducts research in Humanities Computing. It authors multimedia products such as the present CD-ROM, and its research website http://www.cati.paris4.sorbonne.fr. The members of the Centre give presentations on them at international conferences and in research centres. It supports research on the aesthetics and semiotics of multimedia, published in the Centre's own series (Sorbonne University Press) and in international publications. t organises conferences with demonstrations by guest lecturers (King's College London, Oxford, The Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute at the University of Glasgow, The Centre for Advanced Studies in Architecture at Bath, The Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network, The Advanced Technology Center at Missouri University, The Digital Image Center at the University of Virginia). Its members direct the methodological courses in electronic documentation methods for the Sorbonne's undergraduate and graduate students, both in general courses and in subject-related workshops. It is currently taking part in the University's project in on-line distance learning.