Link by Link: A Digital Critique of a Famous Autobiography

That the documents were in digital format, and I would be viewing them on a Web site, made the exercise seem a bit extraordinary. Can’t you just send me a link? I asked.

But there was a reason that I had to be invited there. The Malcolm X Multimedia Study Project was created by the late Prof. Manning Marable, whose new “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” was published last month, days after the author died of lung disease. The material I would be viewing was largely constructed around the earlier, more famous book, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” as told to Alex Haley, who died in 1992. While Columbia may have permission to share a digital version of the original copyrighted book within its campus, they certainly didn’t have permission to share it with the world.

There was another reason that it seemed fitting that I was entering a library with columns and names like Homer and Cicero inscribed above the entrance to click on a computer and open a Web browser: the brilliant online project I was viewing was slowly disintegrating, like so much parchment.

In the biography, which reached No. 3 on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, Professor Marable argues that the famous autobiography overstated Malcolm X’s past life of crime before joining the Nation of Islam and failed to discuss his political evolution toward political organizing after leaving the Nation.

And so the multimedia project — containing F.B.I. and New York Police Department files on Malcolm X, photographs, interviews with scholars and hundreds of detailed descriptions of important people, places, ideas and themes in his life is built around the autobiography.

Each paragraph of the autobiography is numbered, and in most cases each paragraph has a number of links. Click on Earl Little, Malcolm X’s father, who died when Malcolm was 6, and there is his own mini-biography, a photograph, a copy of a letter he wrote to President Calvin Coolidge in 1927.

The project contains seemingly every TV appearance of Malcolm X’s life, beginning with the famous 1959 Mike Wallace documentary “The Hate That Hate Produced.” There are recordings of his speeches, ending with the “Last Message” that Malcolm X delivered on Feb. 14, 1965, in Detroit, shortly before he was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights.

There are interviews Mr. Marable, who was 60 when he died, recorded at Columbia with key participants. Shortly before he died, the actor Ossie Davis explained how he came up with the term “our own black shining prince” in his eulogy of Malcolm X: “I don’t know why the image of a monarchial situation came to me to deal with Malcolm, who certainly was a man of the people,” he says. “It seemed to me that Malcolm, he was not a king, he was a prince.”

With a sly grin, he notes: “People still refer to it from time to time as a fairly acceptable eulogy.”

The site scrutinizes the autobiography, which was written with Mr. Haley in the final years of Malcolm X’s life, the way others scrutinize the Bible — if, that is, biblical commentaries included a photo of the burning bush, interviews with witnesses and a botanist’s report.

“Professor Marable felt that to do a life story, any biographer has to deal with the autobiography because it is such a powerful voice,” said Zaheer Ali, a doctoral student in history with Professor Marable who was project manager for the first four years. “You have to contend with it. Speak with it. Address its silences. Address its contradictions. You can’t even begin to construct Malcolm’s life before deconstructing his autobiography.”

Because Malcolm X was such a moving target in his 39 years of life, he can be seen from many perspectives, Mr. Ali said. One of the innovations of the project the team was most proud of, he said, were the “lenses” that can be applied to the autobiography, controlling which themes and characters are highlighted.

“What it becomes is a kind of knowledge base for people to study Malcolm, as opposed to just reading the biography,” he said, allowing different entry points. “What becomes more critical is the storyteller, more than the story.”

The multimedia project dates from 2001 to 2005 and was assembled by a staff that at its high point numbered 20 graduate and undergraduate students. But much of that material relies on outdated technology, to put it mildly. Accessing material can be slow. And without installing RealPlayer — once a common media player, less common now — none of the audiovisual material can be played.

Also, the project is firmly Web 1.0. There is nothing personalized about the experience — you can’t leave notes, can’t share material, can’t create a study plan.

When he considers the dust settling on the project he worked on for so many years, Mr. Ali recalled that Mr. Marable was aware that there was a danger that the project would be the proverbial tree falling in the forest that no one heard.

“That is the nature of the project, a combination of technological change — the need to update the site — and issues of copyright,” he said in an interview. There may be inexpensive ways of avoiding “total bit-rot” by moving the media to a more modern format, said A. Maurice Matiz, the director of technology at the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, which worked with Mr. Marable to create the Malcolm X Project.

And some of the material that Mr. Marable or Columbia University produced can be migrated to an open site. Mr. Ali said he would try to get permission to share the tapes of four classes of Mr. Marable’s that reflect the themes that he developed in the book.

“He didn’t use technology but understood the value of it,” Mr. Ali said, adding that Professor Marable never read e-mail on a computer, but had an assistant print it out and enter his reply. “He had a sacred relationship with paper.”