Using Electronic Media to Improve Efficiency and Intelligibility in Teaching and Researching the Middle Ages

A satirical multimedia lecture delivered in the Pseudo Society—the parody session of the International Congress on Medieval Studies—at the 40th Congress, Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo), 7 May 2005. (The session is selective but is reserved for parody papers.)

Behind the straight-faced title the piece is a self-running send-up of digital-humanities hype: a demonstration of a glossy “multimedia scholarly desktop” that turns into HAL 9000, locks the user out across a sequence of refusals, crashes to a parody Windows “blue screen,” and ends with the monolith and star-child of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was built as a set of interlinked HTML pages with audio on auto-advancing timers, so that it plays itself.

This deposit preserves a near-final working draft, not the version actually delivered: the author’s final cut was lost when the USB key holding it was overwritten, and its closing material is not recoverable (yes, I see the irony). The archive (zipped HTML) contains the byte-for-byte authored source in originals/ together with a 2026 restoration that makes the talk playable in a current browser—CSS re-pointed from defunct URLs to local files (with three minor support stylesheets reconstructed, the originals being lost), audio migrated from the obsolete Internet-Explorer Windows Media Player control to HTML5 <audio> with the original timings, and two broken references repaired. A companion PDF gives a static, page-by-page walkthrough for citation; it cannot convey the sound or the timed auto-advance, which are the point of the piece. The accompanying README.txt documents the running order and every change.