Print vs Internet Transmission

In the short term, the compiled lecture notes will be much more easily distributed and viewed with a digital form rather than a print form. Creating a website that has a form of online exhibit would be the most effective way to present my text. The website will contain different tabs through which the viewers can gain different information about my text: my motivation for putting on the exhibit, background information about <Understanding Beethoven>, <Understanding Wagner>, and <Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory>, pictures of the notes, transcriptions, and commentaries.

Through the website, I will be able to easily reach many audiences. Because my text is compiled by me, who is still a student and does not have any authority in the fields of musicology and German intellectual history, my target audience is not necessarily experts in the field but people who are either curious about a Harvard student’s academic life in general or laypeople who are interested in the topic and want to get an interesting and easy introduction to the field. With this target audience, internet is much more effective as a platform to distribute my text as it has much lower entrance barrier than printed texts.

One drawback of using a website for the distribution of my text is its ephemerality. During the class trip to Harvard University Archive, I realized how fast a website goes through different changes and must be updated to resist falling into obsolescence in the sea of new websites being created every day. Because presenting my compiled lecture notes is a finite project in a very limited scope, it would not be updated every year, let alone every month, and the website is almost destined to be forgotten and practically dead after a while.

A print publication is not conducive to a short-term distribution of the text but is much better for a long-term distribution. In virtue of having a form of book, my text will have a much more autobiographical and personal feel to it rather than having a merely reportive tone, which would be the case if I choose a website as the means for distribution. The text’s organizational structure will be completely different––rather than dividing the sections into background information and content, those two categories will be merged together. Chapters will be divided by the year that I took the three courses. Each chapter serves as a period of my life that is primarily grounded on my academic pursuits in the context of a specific course, but it will nonetheless be about my life––what academic questions I had, how this class influenced my thoughts outside of the classroom, and how this class influenced my life in the future.

Because I believe that any printed text has more personal and intimate feel to it compared to an online version, I believe that my text will be more conducive to long term preservation if it’s distributed as a printed book. I don’t think my text is well suited for an academic publication, just because what makes my text special is the biographical aspects. I would look for publications like the Boston Globe, or the New York Times, or other publishers that specialize in non-fiction genres.