Remember these? My iBook doesn't have a drive to read 3.5" discs, let alone something that can lift data from their 5.25" ancestors (born in the days when floppies were floppy). Even the most cursory survey of the history of storage media will reveal that we are living in a period of rapid flux, and there's no sign of long-term stability on the horizon that I can see. If research communities are to admit the usefulness of multimedia and hypermedia in their reporting practices, then that very usefulness demands that the data they encode must remain readily accessible in the future--and not just in the next five or fifty-five years, but preferably in five-hundred-and-fifty-five years too. Once the thing itself has been located, it's just about as easy to read from the pages of a book printed in 1451 as it is from one that rolled off the presses yesterday. The same is most definitely not true for digitally encoded texts: notes I made on the sources which I read for my PhD and typed up little over a decade ago in I-forget-which DOS word processor are severely mangled when I try to open them in any of the currently mainstream programmes that sit on my laptop. Books published on paper can be opened and read pretty effortlessly; 'books' published electronically cannot.
In recent months, I have been looking at software designed to assist us make, sift and exploit research notes, especially those applications that can handle multimedia data efficiently. The package that I've lined up to explore in depth is called Tinderbox, but I'll not write about it in detail yet. (A couple of days ago, I booked my place at the Tinderbox workshop for researchers that meets later this month in Denmark; as an out-and-out novice, I'm very much looking forward to seeing how more experienced users work the programme.) There are plenty of other apps to consider, many of which are freely available, being the result of collaborations between academic researchers. Here's the snag, though: we face the problem of fragmentation. Ideas encoded in this programme are almost certainly not going to be legible in that one. These programmes are unembarrasingly experimental, but most of them--even those that are presented by their development communities as relatively easy to get started with--have fallen at the first hurdle of having me use them because they are dependent on software I know nothing about and cannot prioritise time to learn. This is my loss, I realise, but also a sign of something not yet having come of age. Two that I would really like to explore further (at least as far as getting them running on my laptop) are: Compendium (built to run on OS X 10.3, which is not the current one; I'm ignorant enough not to know whether running it on my 10.4 machine might involve risks I'm not prepared to take. "When in doubt, don't" my nan used to say, which has stood me in good stead during many an IT crisis) and ARTware (which requires VisualWorks Smalltalk to be installed first--the download and installation instructions for that were sufficient to put me off).
Software stays still for such a short period of time (a year or two at most) that it seems unlikely that the number of users ever clustering around one or two of these niche programmes will reach the critical mass necessary to elevate them to effective community tools. A tipping point may emerge if 'agnostic' data format standards can be agreed, which would allow ideas to be encoded in a manner which is utterly transparent to a variety of software packages. There's a biting point to be found between short-term improvements in data richness versus long-term (in)accessibility issues. For a community that has developed its insights on the processes of publication and peer review for several centuries now, this matters a great deal!
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