Interactive Education: Transitioning CD-ROMs to the Web

rmly believe that Visual Anthropology is an apical ancestor of multimedia scholarship. Anthropologists have conventionally recorded the diverse cultural heritage of humankind by means of varied media: written text, graphics, film, sound and still images, as well as three dimensional objects and even performance skills. Generations of anthropologists have employed motion picture film to record and represent the diversity of human cultures across the globe. But because the university in general accepts only written texts as truly academic publications, much of "visual anthropology" has been routinely devalued by university boards of merit review. Even the pioneering efforts of anthropologists like Franz Boas (1917), Bateson and Mead (1936-38, Mead 1977) or Timothy Asch (1971, 1975) to put filmed ethnography in the mainstream of anthropological forms of representation were resisted and marginalized within academic anthropology, for the very rational reason that linear media like films la