If it were possible to half-bake a CD-ROM, this is how it would turn out. The idea behind this CD-ROM was promising, and I greatly looked forward to the chance of reviewing it, but the execution is execrable. I would not recommend anyone to buy this in its current form.
The idea--and I can see publishers falling for it--is to provide translations of pilgrim texts to the Holy Land, and then use hyperlinks to a gazetteer with texts and images which will explain and elucidate all the places mentioned in the sources. But in this case, once the idea had been established and accepted, no further thought seems to have been expended on what to include or how to explain it. It is simply impossible to establish the audience at which this work is aimed.
The texts chosen are Paula and Eustochium's letter to Marcella of 386 and Jerome's Pilgrimage of Paula of 404, Mukaddasi's description of Palestine of 985, Theoderich's Guide of 1172 and Benjamin of Tudela's Itinerary of 1173. The texts are reprinted from the Palestine Pilgim Text editions (mostly with their original introductions), and I have no problem with these. This choice gives a broad range of views of the Holy Land in terms of date and religion, but also requires the editors to do more work in their gazetteer. They must now explain the changes that the different viewers saw at different times. This they singularly fail to do.
Take one, fairly typical, example: the church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. The text in the gazetteer for this major monument reads as follows: Bethlehem. Nativity, Church or Basilica of the [then links to Theodorich and M's texts]. Traditional site of birth of Jesus. For a plan of this remarkable church and description see Freeman-Grenville, 77-85, Murphy- O'Connor, 167-71. See also Stanley, chaps. 14, 32, p.439. For Theoderich's twenty-five steps down to the grotto, Phocas (chap. 22, p.32) says "sixteen". For a description and analysis of the mosaic work in the crypt, see Hazard, 119-23; for the frescoes, see pp.254-58. The tombs of Joseph and Jerome, as well as Eusebius, Paula and Eustochium, are in the caves beneath the church. See Murphy-O'Connor, 171. To whom is this pithy list of references and discursus on steps aimed? It seems to rule out lay readers, modern pilgrims or undergraduates as it assumes much prior knowledge and provides so little general information: what date is the church? what does it look like and how is it decorated? how much change has it undergone? What, indeed, is its importance and function? In fact, there is a groundplan of the church included on the same 'page' that seems not to have been noticed by the author of the text. However, this plan superimposes Justinian's church over that of Constantine, without giving any information about which is which. It gives no clues as to how to separate out or read these plans (scale? dates? orientation?). The western end of Constantine's church is even guillotined off the bottom of the page and two numbers--referring to the site of the grotto and Jerome's cave--hover uncertainly around the plan. So maybe, the CD is designed for researchers and academics instead? The list of references certainly presumes a reader with access to a large, and quite impressive library. But what would they want with this? The list of pilgrim references to the church is far from complete (only one other source is given), so no kind of encyclopaedic overview can be gained, and as for recent literature, it is lamentable: no references to Jaroslav Folda or Gustav Kuhnel for starters.
Such an analysis could be made of almost every entry, which wander from the banal ("Makkah: Mecca") to the obscure (see the very technical account of various details of the Holy Sepulchre on p. 195).
In their defence, I would imagine that the editors would say that the choice of information in the gazetteer was determined by the predilections of the pilgrim accounts. But even if we accept this, the presentation of material is unhelpful and lacks context. The assumption that you have a large library to turn to to follow up their suggestions defeats the point of creating a tool like this, on which so much more information can be stored. From what I could see, the gazetteer's information generally seems to presume a date in the twelfth century for most of the information given. This is supported by the 'interactive' map of Jerusalem, which has c.1170 in its title. That, of course, automatically excludes or downplays the importance of the information in the earlier texts. This is a tension throughout the gazetteer that is never really resolved.
The CD includes a large number of illustrations, but again they lack any rationale. The profusion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prints seems to suggest the editors had a general audience in mind: the tendency is definitely towards romantic, orientalizing views. But too little information is provided for these to be of use even to lay readers: most provide the artist's name, but rarely a date. I spotted one dreadful painting of Bethlehem by Holman Hunt. The photographs mix historical and contemporary images, but are often poorly scanned in and very dark. The overwhelmingly pink photo of the Pool of Hezekiah on p. 207 looks to be one of those old hand- coloured postcards; either that or the pool has been irradiated recently.
There are a number of errors which suggest ignorance or worse. A Mameluk doorway is labelled as "the Dome of the Chain", and the "late ancient view" of Jerusalem in the Madaba map is entitled "Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina", despite the city being clearly labelled in the mosaic as "The Holy City, Jerusalem". This is very specifically an image of the Christian city, rather than Hadrian's pagan construction of the second century.
One section provides a series of maps of the Holy Land, starting with [a copy of] a twelfth-century T-in-O map, and moving on to early seventeenth-century prints. These are scanned in at such low resolution that it is impossible to read any of the place names written on them. Are they meant just to be 'charming' (p. 256), or to serve some more useful purpose?
The bibliography is also a very hit-and-miss affair. While some recent books are included, such as Martin Biddle's Tomb of Christ (1999), whole fields of research are omitted. As pointed out above, nothing by Jaroslav Folda or Gustav Kuhnel is on the list, nor are there references to Lucy- Anne Hunt, Robert Ousterhout or Nurith Kenaan-Kedar, to name a few of those who have worked on the twelfth century alone.
In practical terms, this CD ROM is an object lesson in how not to structure an 'interactive' tool. The technology seems woefully out-of- date. It requires a fair bit of ingenuity to work out how to load the CD in the first place--it is not self- loading. The instructions are less than clear and has one crucial error: the actual programme that runs the CD is called holyland.win not holyland.exe as the instructions proclaim. Users must sit through a compulsory 90 second 'introduction'. This is a selection of images and music before the opening menu of the CD itself appears. There is no way to avoid this. After two viewings this becomes tiresome, but for a reviewer returning to the CD time and time again it is a painful nightmare. The choice of music (chosen to 'evoke' the exotic orient, perhaps?) panders to all Edward Said's worst prejudices about Anglo-American orientalism. The music certainly has no obvious link to the Holy Land that I could discern. The programming underpinning the CD is very basic. It is effectively a traditional book placed on a disk, with buttons to move on or back one 'page'. The text is full of links and cross-references, but each only sends you to another page in the 'book'. The limitations of this are made manifest by the decision to allow users only ever to go back one link in any chain. Thus if you follow a series of links to pursue an idea or question (usually fruitlessly in my experience) it is impossible to retrace your steps to where you began. There is no search facility. There is a 'go to page x' function, but that requires you to remember or write down what every page is as you go. The CD requires your computer's undivided attention. You can not easily change between applications while using it, nor can you copy portions of text onto a clipboard for use elsewhere. Whilst the latter may be understandable for copyright reasons (although the choice of nineteenth-century translations was obviously determined by the lack of copyright restrictions), the former is exceptionally annoying. On my computer at work the CD crashed every time I used it, taking the whole system down with it (this on a Pentium III with 128MB RAM and 20Gb harddisk). This of course means that you have to sit through the introduction again when you re-load it^æ
It says on the box that this is Version 2.0 "completely revised and updated". I extend my sympathies to the person who was asked to review Version 1.