Support for Ben Franklin's world comes from the

Omaha Institute of Early American History and Culture.

The Omaha Institute created the OI Reader because it has been thinking about the future

of historical scholarship. The OI Reader is a distinctive app that allows scholars to

integrate all types of digital media into their publications and gives readers the ability

to read and interact with multimedia content. One of the scholars who is working with the OI to pioneer this new type of historical scholarship is our friend from episode 66 Simon Newman

Simon is working on a project about Jamaican slaves who ran away during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

He's using his research to write a new type of scholarly article that uses text, maps, music, video, and other sounds to give us an interactive and three-dimensional

picture of the runaway slaves and the Jamaica they lived in.

I asked Simon to tell us what his new article will look like if it's published and why he turned to the

Omaha Institute and the OI reader to help him realize his vision.

This isn't just about adding some flashy bells and whistles to an academic journal article.

It's about using different kinds of media and evidence in order to enhance comprehension and analysis.

It's to support an argument. It's to suggest that by listening, by viewing video and these sorts of things, we can actually understand the past in a different way. We can perhaps recreate experience and recreate things about how people understood their environment

in ways that are much more difficult to do with just text. What you'll see is a great many more

images and maps. You'll probably see three-dimensional topographical mapping.

It will show how the landscape of 18th century Jamaica looked, the contours, and you'll be able to do

a sort of fly through and see what a journey through it would have been like,

the different kinds of environments, and then start populating them.

You'll also see things like video scenes with 18th century images integrated into them, recordings of music and people speaking to give a sense of the sound of a very African 18th century Jamaican society.

And all of this will be integrated, so much of it will sort of occur if you turn a page you might see an image and a recording would start.

I wanted to do this initially with the Omaha Institute and with the OI Reader because I realized that having downloaded the OI Reader onto my

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