Scholarly Collections on the Web: Media Reconfigurations at Play

Abstract

With the Internet a new medium has become available for communicating scholarly texts. This article focuses on the World Wide Web (the Web) as a global, hypertextual archive for scholarly texts and its significance in reconfiguring the corpus of scholarly texts. The first part addresses the Web in light of hypertext theory and a media theoretic perspective, concentrating on its roots in issues related to the flood of information and its qualities as a medium. The second part will zoom in on the actual use of the Web as a publication and archival medium for scholars, with a focus on two different scholarly archives. The article concludes with some general reflections on the Web as an archive of archives based on the concepts of network and complexity.