Harper’s Magazine recently redesigned their website and Ben wrote a post that jostled a few ideas i’ve had floating in the back of my head. I posted this as a comment to his post, but I wanted to get it up on my site also:
Harper’s has a new web concept designed by Paul Ford of F Train. History bears heavily on the refurbished site, almost overwhelmingly — especially compared to the stripped-down affair that preceded it. But considering that Harper’s has a more than ordinary amount of history to cart around — at 157 years, it’s the oldest general interest monthly in the United States — one has to appreciate the rather ovewhelming task that Ford and the editors faced. A journal that has published continuously since before the Civil War, on through Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, civil rights, the 60s, the Cold War, right up to the present carries a hefty chunk of the national memory — and a lot of baggage, good and bad. So it’s fitting that the new design is packed with dates, inviting readers to dig into the past while also surveying the present. I can’t think of another news site in which the archives mingle so promiscuously with the front page spread. The result is a site that feels as much like a library as a periodical.
There really aren’t good interfaces for representing large amounts of data through time, and the current website’s clutter is evidence for that. There are tag clouds that gives us a small taste on what could be done with time. But nothing exists in a large scale.
I think Harper’s website has the potential to make us to reconsider the role of a magazine and the way we engage with them in the digital age, and not just for Harpers or massive collections. While magazines have historically been self-contained published works, often with clearly stated views (much more so than newspapers), I think if people engage with them as archives of ideas, we could also see a change in the way magazines see themselves.
The magazine form has always had problems: it’s strict periodic format (monthlies, weeklies, etc) is an artifact of the print form. I think this redesign shows that we might to reconsider magazines as vessels filled with ideas; connected, but not bound to time. And since these vessels provide all the content all the time, then we can imagine time as the thing you “flip through” (as opposed to pages) and not a special mode of browsing. This has always been the case for researchers, who’ve used bound magazines in libraries… but this could be the way all engage magazines.
I recently heard an interesting discussion between Paul Glastris of The Washington Monthly and Franklin Foer of The New Republic on the direction that their magazines were taking. The consensus they arrived at was that blogs stripped away their need to cover topical issues and have allowed to focus on what magazines have always done best: long narratives.
This is not really a new idea. I mean we can see things like The Complete New Yorker on CD-ROM, which provide a collection of all their work. But what I think is significant here is that the default unit in which we engage with a magazine could change from issues, to just one unit: the magazine.