In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Review of website for Dangerous Citizens [<http://dangerouscitizens.columbia.edu>]
  • Roland S. Moore
Neni Panourgia, Dangerous Citizens website [<http://dangerouscitizens.columbia.edu>].

Scientific journals have paved the way in offering links to datasets, analyses, and supplementary material stored on the seemingly boundless Internet, all of which are unsuitable for the rigorous spatial and structural constraints of journals. In the worlds of entertainment, too, films, comic books, musical groups, and television shows lure additional audiences through their multimedia outreach. Perhaps we could wonder why the social sciences and humanities have not made greater use of such big-picture thinking to break the confines of traditional book forms.

Neni Panourgia's Dangerous Citizens (2009) represents a dramatic critique of the post–World War II Greek government's repression of those who challenged them. Because of its multiple documentary and emotional layers and the surprising connections between them, Dangerous Citizens is more suitable for reincarnation on the Internet than most books, especially as it features a multi-dimensional presentation of texts, images, and multiple interpretations that stretch the limits of a normal linear book.

The Dangerous Citizens site reflects the growing use of the web for flexible extensions of physical books that can only hold so much. The relative novelty of this anthropological book-based website raises many questions: Who will maintain these sites in the long run? How can quality be controlled? What level of access can an author have? There is a lengthy but readable page of legalese concerning rights and terms of use—the copyright is held jointly by the author and the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at Columbia University Libraries/Information Services. Theoretically, one could print all the pages and not buy the book or check it out from the library. But why? The costs of toner and paper are substantial, the papers tend to get shuffled, and books are tidier containers that are easier to find on shelves or be carried in backpacks from home to school and back.

It appears that this website is an experiment for the press to increase the interwoven connections between book and Internet—keeping the book alive. The template for the website is clean, straightforward, and easy to follow. In the upper left, at the time of this review, a discount offer for the book suggests yet another way in which the site is supposed to lead to greater sales of the volume. Navigation bars below the author's name and the book title are intuitive. Maps were not available at the time of the review, but a great deal of other scanned visual material, including all of the pictures featured in the book, were accessible. There is a scrolling text chronology that in the future promises to be more interactive. Thoughtfully, the readers are offered a choice of three sizes of type font in order to make the text comfortable for them.

This review refers to the website as it appeared in March 2010, some four months after its debut. The time marker is significant, because the site may well look more refined by the time this review appears. Like all websites, this is a work in progress, with some links that do not connect and other parts aptly labeled as under construction. However, the site offers a tantalizing promise to redefine static books as hubs for contents that extend in time and volume. Perhaps the [End Page 140] most noteworthy lacuna in the site is the sort of interactive Web 2.0 opportunity for readers to weigh in, engage, argue, and contribute as well as consume—but that is a step the press may contemplate once the full deployment of currently promised features is complete.

While contemplating if I would assign the website and book in one of my classes, I thought of another multimedia resource that I have used in recent years. With generally good results, I have assigned Bright Balkan Morning (Blau et al. 2003) to students because it offers a processed simulation of the jumbled input of real fieldwork—transcribed interviews, ethnographic description, arresting images, and chaotic soundscapes on a companion CD, all contained in a beautiful coffee table book. Both Bright Balkan...

pdf

Share