My first reaction to this site and the book to which it's devoted was not unlike outright boredom. Surely, I thought, this can only be of interest to the particular group of historians who study the time and place whence this tome originated. The material seemed dry and I wondered why it could not have been printed in a book as easily as it had been published on a webpage.
Then it occured to me (I admit, I am slow from time to time) that this was, in fact, excellent fodder for the likes of this class. As I made my way through page after page, link after link bringing me more and more information, I realized that this wealth of data would not have been possible in the context of traditionally printed and bound text. Even if the printer(s) had been able to organize the original volumes' contents and any relevent information in such a way that the reader might be able to effectively find information without perusing it in its entirety, the book would have been weighty to say the least, and the costs of publishing would probably not be overcome given the likely lack of demand for such a thing. By making it available online instead, the publisher(s) of the site avoided the unnecessary costs of printing while providing access to a much larger audience. Granted, the site does not live up to its full potential (only the records for Bedfordshire and Berkshire are available online at this time and there are no satisfying images of the original text itself), but since extensive auxiliary information is as easy to retrieve as tapping a few keys and clicking a button or two, there's not much left to be desired. In fact, for simplicity's sake, if you want to know more about the history or implications of the Domesday Book, including how it relates to the Bayeaux tapestry, I suggest you just click on one or more of the links below.
The Domesday Book Online
The Domesday Book @ The National Archives
The Domesday Book @ The History Learning Site
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3 comments:
I was hit with that same feeling of boredom. As antithesis as this is to the idea of 'reading' I would have liked to see more images of the actual tome and the pages within. I can't read latin, but I feel I'd get more out of seeing how the book looked, the binding, the age of the pages, the ancient ink slowly fading. These more tangible things would have caught my interest more than just the descriptions of the content. The webpages you provided had more content like this, and I was happy to briefly peruse them.
While you may have found perusing the website to be a tedious task, imagine what it would be to actually have to read the book. I was thankful to be able to glean so much information from the website's FAQ section but did investigate some of the links that you suggested and found them to be much more informative and interesting. Of course I venturing to those varied links hoping to unlock the clue of our assignment, which I confess I completely missed until it was pointed out through the writings of others.
You were right the first time, it is kinda boring. As neat as the idea of hypertext is, creating a fully-interactive website about something like, say, the stages of development of the Dung Beetle, doesn't really do it justice. After all, a rose is a rose is a rose no matter how responsive it's dimensions are.
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