A Multimedia Prehistory - Text 2
This is why we hope briefly to propose a rapprochement between some constitutive elements of the webdoc and a form of knowledge sharing which preceded it, putting them in series around the tension between spectacular and didactic, with a manner of gathering information which relies heavily on the image and which is always the result of an author’s quest to convey his or her experience of the faraway.
At the root of the webdoc lies constantly renewed invention in search of an appropriate form and structure. The authors of the webdocs which have drawn our attention have had to get away from their home turf and go out to encounter their topic, like any good documentarian. By experimenting with the interface, webdocs appear to play out the approach of turn of the century pioneers of scientific popularization.[1] We see, in the kind of communication in which these objects engage, the extension of an older pedagogical tradition, a kind of visual and spectacular pedagogy: the illustrated lectures and popularizing magazines found at the turn of the twentieth century.
The web documentary may be seen as part of a cultural series characterized, whatever media manifestations it takes specific to different eras, by wavering between didacticism and sensationalism. One of the manifestations of disseminating knowledge common in the nineteenth century was the illustrated lecture; permit us this digression. Illustrated lectures took place in large institutions, such as the Muséum d’histoire naturelle in Paris, which mixed sharing new knowledge with modern-day amusement. Although some presentations were reserved for a restricted audience (those of the Académie des sciences, for example), others were public and drew crowds. They were the product of a desire to disseminate and make knowledge accessible: they
continued the series of lectures on contemporary developments in science inaugurated in 1894 and which, on various occasions, drew so many people to the Jardin des plantes. It was certainly a good idea, and one not seen before then, to use the splendid resources of the Muséum to establish popular education in which the public would be brought up to date about science topics involving those events on which for a moment the general public’s attention is fixed.[2]
The science being spoken about here is not the hard sciences. It encompasses an imaginary applied to mastering the unknown, quite often with a dose of the fantastic and adventure stories. Travel accounts by returning voyagers were typical of such lectures in this sense.
By viewing the web documentary as tied to this tradition of spectacular pedagogy and adventure stories we can, on the one hand, avoid the trap of seeing in the webdoc only the inevitable transformation of cinema into the digital and, on the other hand, using older practices, better identify the features of the new form. What stands out are the central and autobiographical role of the author and the first-person writing that comes with such, all wrapped up in an educational mission on a chosen topic. The way the authors come into play in their quest is expressed by the fragmentary state of the text they leave the viewer. In the tradition of illustrated lectures – typically modern and specific to emerging large cities – explorers were in the grip of a true passion for conveying their observations graphically (engravings, drawings and photographs to document the phenomena to be studied scientifically, such as the classification of animals). It was through these projecttions, often accompanied by their written texts, read out and acted out to create veritable multimedia performances, that they turned their discoveries into entertainment. Complementing these performances, whose history can be traced by studying the illustrated magazines which popularized science, the texts conveyed their content to the magazine’s subscribers, who formed a broad scientific community.
Take a case dating from 1902: the geologist Alfred Lacroix, Chair of mineralogy at the Muséum since 1893, was dispatched to Martinique just after the eruption of Mount Pelée, which destroyed the town of Saint-Pierre on 8 May 1902. He carried out a perilous study of the volcano on site, photographing it and taking numerous measurements. His correspondence from the mission on the flanks of the volcano, which were regularly read before the Académie des sciences and published in La Nature,[3] conveyed his findings, but also a number of anecdotes and bits of adventures situating the images in real human experience. All that took a multimedia form (we acknowledge the anachronism) in the pages of magazines, embodying a concern to find a new aesthetic form to convey a kind of experience emerging at the time. These lectures, and their illustrated transcription, were forms of knowledge as entertainment. Here we find a quite conscious choice of mode of communication for sharing knowledge.
Each web documentary studied in this parcours, like older forms, has found the appropriate form and structure to report the always disorienting detached pieces of the experience of discovering.
