one last try
RL Jaffe, 617-253-4858, jaffe@mitlns.mit.edu (jaffe@mitlns.mit.edu")
Mon, 5 Jun 1995 17:33:52 -0400 (EDT)
I believe that Peter and Greg have proved my point about field specificity in
their replies to my suggestion. Peter, in particular, went through a long
list of fields in which multimedia tools are useful and concluded by saying
"I've spoken only about the humanities side of things...". Indeed! The
multimedia issues are hot in the humanities, but don't have a role in the
physical sciences. Likewise haptic interfaces are likely to be important in
engineering, but I doubt they'll play a role in humanities, unless perhaps one
would like to get a "feel" for one of the characters in one's favorite novel.
Finally, advanced methods of symbolic manipulation, run as encapsulated
scripts in hypertextual documents look like very nice new tools for analytical
sciences like physics and math, but I don't see them having much role in
humanities, architecture, art or the more design oriented side of engineering.
So, my point is that none of these specific technologies have institute-wide
constituencies and are best addressed within schools, or perhaps in a
collaboration between representatives of a couple of schools. I don't think
our committee would have come to a useful position on them.
Bob