One obvious attraction is its ability to show the actual film sequence under discussion, rather than merely a few stills from the sequence, as in traditional books. This capacity will have a great impact on close film analysis and other forms of concrete description. Film scholars using hypermedia will have the ability to incorporate vast amounts of supplementary material such as studio records, ad campaigns, screenplays, excerpts from other scholarly works, and so on. Henry Breitrose and others at Stanford have created a multimedia study on the early American film industry, focusing particularly on the career of Adolph Zukor. As a format for scholarly publishing, hypermedia has clear pros and cons.
Eye strain is a serious consideration.
Because of this, and because comp uter screens fit fewer readable words than book pages, it is particularly difficult to follow lengthy passages of text on screen. These limitations require authors to write in smaller, more pithy chunks of information and analysis perhaps welcome in our f ield, but nevertheless a style that does not suit all scholarly writing. Whether or not scholars embrace hypermedia as a channel for scholarly work, I expect university press books will soon include a CD-ROM containing color ilhlstrations and the film sequence s analyzed in the book. Although movies and photos take up a lot of disc space, plain text takes up v ery little. Electronic publishing on CD-ROM is thus ideal for huge reference works, anthologies, collections, and facsimiles.