Tradition and technology in a happy marriage - such might be the best way to describe this innovative, yet substantial web. Indeed, this site could serve as a model for how to genuinely use hypermedia to support scholarship rather than simply distribute text in a new medium.
Calling itself "The Electronic Academical Village", this site offers access to projects in the humanities which demonstrate how the new medium can be used in a creative and scholarly way to promote the studies of the humanities. Perhaps the best way to describe it is to list some of the projects.
A well-written and apparently widely-read journal of postmodern studies began and has endured as a purely electronic journal at this web. Postmodern Culture, An Electronic Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism, offers peer-reviewed articles three times a year on various aspects of postmodernism. One of the advantages of this format is that the information here contained can be repackaged in a variety of helpful formats, such as "Electronic Text Awards", "Popular Culture Columns", "Reviews", and others, a rich mine of postmodern intelligence. But the site goes beyond being a mere collection of texts in PMC-MOO, a text-based virtual reality facility, "a combination conference center and theme park" which allows journal users to discuss issues raised in the articles.
Other IATH examples include: the Spoon Collective, "...a group of Net citizens devoted to free and open discussion of philosophical issues", several databases such the Rossetti database devoted to the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a Pompeii database that focuses on the ancient city (with well-scanned color images of the city), Piers Plowman, and the Valley of the Shadow, a multimedia project that "... interweaves the histories of two communities on either side of the Mason-Dixon line during the era of the American Civil War."
Other projects include two essays by Jerome McGann about using hypertext in critical editing; two essays by John Unsworth about use of the Internet by humanities scholars. Also the IATH-MOO - text-based virtual reality facility for real-time discussion of IATH projects is worth a visit. These are solidly-based projects that give a hint of what humanities scholars can do with networked information.