Drawings are postscript files, not meeting international standards, but
at least designed to go across platforms. Images, or rather the real
archival forms, consist of the best available slides, which are being
digitized. Much of the catalog material exists in database form--a form
that the average user could use, manipulate, and display on a personal
computer, but only at great cost. Thus, this is where the concession
comes in: All of this rich, well-marked-up information is stripped of
much of its content; the images are converted into bit-maps and the text
into small formatted chunks. All this information can then be imported
into HyperCard and run on a mid-range Macintosh, which is what Perseus
users have. This fact has made it possible for Perseus to attain wide
use fairly rapidly. Without those archival forms the HyperCard version
being demonstrated could not be made easily, and the project could not
have the potential to move to other forms and machines and software as
they appear, none of which information is in Perseus on the CD.
Of the numerous multimedia aspects of Perseus, MYLONAS focused on the
textual. Part of what makes Perseus such a pleasure to use, MYLONAS
said, is this effort at seamless integration and the ability to move
around both visual and textual material. Perseus also made the decision
not to attempt to interpret its material any more than one interprets by
selecting. But, MYLONAS emphasized, Perseus is not courseware: No
syllabus exists. There is no effort to define how one teaches a topic
using Perseus, although the project may eventually collect papers by
people who have used it to teach. Rather, Perseus aims to provide
primary material in a kind of electronic library, an electronic sandbox,
so to say, in which students and scholars who are working on this
material can explore by themselves. With that, MYLONAS demonstrated
Perseus, beginning with the Perseus gateway, the first thing one sees
upon opening Perseus--an effort in part to solve the contextualizing
problem--which tells the user what the system contains.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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