Production of multimedia artifacts demands guidance for both engineers developing software and designers generating content. This paper distinguishes conceptually between media, multiple media and multimedia and defines the multimedia document as both communicative object and system, thus identifying integration as a fundamental of production; it proposes media transformations as a means of describing the design activities involved in the generation of media elements containing content; it defines navigable discourse structure as the discourse structure actually realised by the combination of media elements and operations, and it proposes a discourse driven process model. From a practical point of view, the paper outlines two case studies of the production of multimedia demonstrations of software engineering tools; it provides Transformation Representation Rules as a succinct means for recording media transformations; finally it describes the main components of a practical method, base...

and physical media In general use the term medium denotes any kind of intermediate agency, means or channel. In the context of multimedia the term `medium' is applicable with two specific meanings, setting aside this common usage. Any subject matter being communicated has an associated medium which is its carrier, or vector, in the physical sense. This sense is applicable to air waves for speech, to printing ink on paper for text, to photographic film for moving images, or to the variety of physical substrates that may carry digitally coded signals. The variety and sophistication of traditional physical carrier media (for example the multivarious types which may be used in cataloguing the objects in an art museum), the characteristics of the objects associated with them (for example the many forms which the book has taken), and their social and cultural impact (for example that of photographic film as used in the cinema) form an important area of study in itself. In the second sense, ...

In the way of products, language, and way of life, so much has happened in digital culture that, as a growing project emerging more or less through its formative years, it is now worth asking what the scholar of technology can say about the digital situation and how such systematic observations (if any) can be stated. When, perhaps around the mid 1970’s, digital developments were just emerging from research settings, almost anything seemed possible and little of what was problematic or impractical to implement was talked about much. A swell of new products was followed by what seems like endless advertising, followed by the rise Web, and then dot-com revolution, and finally a huge retrenchment, so that by now, talk of possibilities is rare in comparison to announcements from labs and corporations. If we follow the money, little remains obscure about the evolution or effects of digital culture. Major developments have permeated the corporation as the paradigm of the enterprise system; likewise so in new probing methodologies of science; in pop culture’s bandwagon-style