Dear all, I am unlurking after a long period with a slightly unusual request. My Ph.D. supervisor Ashish Rajadhyaksha, who is probably one of the most recognised names in Cinema Studies in Asia, has come out with his three volume Magnum Opus (my words) titled "Cinema in the Time of Celluloid" which is going to be out on the shelves this Winter. However, this email is not a shameless plug for his book, though I DO heavily recommend anybody with interest in Cinema to have a look at it.
Ashish, unlike most academic authors, has a very keen interest in keeping his work Open Access and he has retained the rights for free digital dissemination of the entire book and is hoping to make it Public Access. The book will soon be available in a .pdf format for anybody to have a free download and read. In the process of thinking about the digital dissemination, we have now been having conversations about the form of an e-book - or in other words, if things published online are not books, then they should probably not follow the conventions of reading a book, and yet be able to make a sustained argument and information dissemination using a different form. Ashish is now suggesting that instead of treating the end result online as a book, he is more interested in looking at what form can the material he has (textual, visual, moving images, audio interviews) take so that it can be most effective online. For a scoping exercise, he is right now searching for 'interesting' forms of documentation online to see if an existing form appeals to him. I am, on his behalf, placing a request here... What are your favourite sites for digital documentation? Do you have any ideas on what form academic work or scholarship can take if it does not have to simulate the printed book? Have you come across (and hopefully saved) interesting spaces which you think helped the argument because of the form of the documentation and its design? We'd be quite grateful if we could get some links to start with and see if it might help in thinking about the form of online publishing that might be most conducive to online dissemination and reading. Thanks Nishant -- Nishant Shah Doctoral Candidate, CSCS, Bangalore. Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society,( www.cis-india.org ) Asia Awards Fellow, 2008-09 # 0-9740074884
