Date: Tue, 07 May 2002 20:59:23 +0100
From: Cornelius Holtorf <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask],

A reply to Brian Fagan's review
by Cornelius Holtorf

I am grateful to Brian Fagan for commenting on my work (in Internet 
Archaeology 11). But I also feel that he has failed to understand some of 
the aims and ambitions of my project. I am happy to accept my own share of 
responsibility for this failed communication, and I would therefore like to 
clarify a few matters in this brief reply.

Although it is perhaps not surprising that a reader who describes himself 
as "computer-illiterate" finds himself "somewhat at a loss" for words, 
struggling "to grasp" the intentions, and "begging" for a linear narrative 
when engaging with a complex multimedia argument, I do not intend to dwell 
here on the conditions for, and the possibilities of, an emerging 
electronic scholarship (see Holtorf forthcoming). Suffice to say that the 
monograph offers a full account of what I studied, why and how I conducted 
my research, and detailed guidance on how it is meant to be read (the pages 
/0.3, /0.5 and /0.2 provide starting points). Instead I wish to put a few 
things right regarding the content of my work.

Most importantly, it is crucial to understand the fundamental difference - 
compared to normal academic conventions - of the way my work presents its 
ideas and arguments. Yes indeed, I have tried to be "undisciplined". This 
is why I did not set out "in search for answers to three questions", 
applying a distinct research methodology and writing a linear argument. 
Instead, the purpose of my research was to explore three main themes in 
relation to the monuments in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. These themes unfold in 
detail and are elaborated over a large number of pages which are 
interconnected by meaningful hyperlinks. The intellectual rigour of my work 
lies in the carefully and laboriously crafted assemblage of rich 
connections, i.e. the meaningful relations between the various themes and 
topics discussed. Arguably, the substance of my work does not lie in the 
depth of each page but in the width of the entire argument.

The database is not the "main meat" or "backbone" of my work but it simply 
offers one way of exploring it, one avenue to enter my e-monograph, among 
others. It is perhaps more illuminating to choose a vegetarian metaphor for 
describing the relations between the different pages: my work is a large 
field of potatoes which are all very nutritious and tasty but should not be 
eaten raw or by themselves. The monograph follows an interpretive approach 
(as Fagan notes), and that involves processing raw products into something 
edible and delicious by making them part of a meal. The e-monograph 
reflects my own way of cooking both the material and the ideas that I had 
come across - and in this sense everything in this work is about "what the 
author thinks".

It is particularly disappointing to see Fagan describe the way a megalith 
in Domsühl appeared in 1995 as "misuse" (Fagan's Figure 4), since I put so 
much effort in arguing precisely the opposite. I called it a 'neglected' 
megalith, arguing that even vandalism and destruction are part of the 
history culture of different ages and therefore deserve to be appreciated 
and studied to the same extent as other meaningful receptions. I stated 
that the meanings given by academic archaeology and heritage management to 
ancient monuments are not necessarily more appropriate or more relevant 
than other meanings. All this seems to have been missed in this review.

A final disappointment lies in the suspicion that Fagan settled a little 
too quickly for an off-the-shelf attack against theoretical terms in 
current archaeology, against what he calls "laissez-faire research", and 
for very conventional values regarding the 'usefulness' of a monograph. It 
appears that, for Fagan, although many parts of my work seemed too simple, 
the whole proved too complex.

Reference

Holtorf, Cornelius (forthcoming) "A hypermedia PhD thesis and the future of 
electronic scholarship." In: Archaeological Informatics: Beyond Technology. 
Edited by J. Huggett and S. Ross.


----
Cornelius Holtorf
University of Cambridge, Department of Archaeology
http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/ch264/homepage.html