Like many other law schools and other institutions, our school has in recent years made many of its public lectures and symposia available via webcast. This can be very useful to keep a record of these events and make them more widely available to potential audiences who cannot be physically present at the events. They can be particularly helpful in cases where there is no transcript or other publication related to the proceedings that will be published in a law review or other format.
However, I have recently heard people talking about whether webcasts are superior to transcripts or other printed publications such that they will ultimately overtake the need for text-based formats. I wonder if this is the right way to think about it? In my view, webcasts provide different benefits to text based accounts of proceedings and I don't think it should necessarily be an "either/or" question if it can be helped.
While webcasts capture a lot more information than text can, they are often lengthy and it is difficult to quickly skim through them and find a pertinent snippet of information. People may be much more selective about which webcasts they watch than which text accounts (transcripts, blog summaries, law reviews) they peruse largely because it only takes a few minutes to skim through (or keyword search) a text account to see if there's anything relevant in the proceedings while it may take a lot longer to find out if there's anything of interest in a webcast.
It seems to me that a text based account of a proceeding may usefully supplement a webcast in that it can: (a) quickly help people discover whether the proceedings contain anything of interest; and, (b) direct the reader to the part of the webcast that is particularly relevant to that person's particular interest.
So I guess I would hope that people who produce records of lectures and symposias try to think about text based and other information processing formats as being complementary to each other rather than as alternatives. What do others think?
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