The Goldberg Variations 1: Assessing the academic quality of multidimensional linear texts and their re-emergence in multimedia publications

Abstract

After an introduction on the recent history of academic publishing in non-linear media, the article compares two versions of an academic publication by the American sociologist David Theo Goldberg. The two versions deal with the same subject matter, but one is a traditional scholarly article, the other published in an online journal in a non-linear format. While the academic article constructs a tight, linear argument, subordinating a range of themes to a single key theme, the non-linear text gives all themes equal weight, accommodates a greater amount of evidence and documentation, and has more scope for multimodality.