This paper discusses a cluster of small projects based on the belief that multimedia in the humanities will be most effective when it becomes a flexible and responsive means of expression integrated with the working patterns of scholars in the humanities, which are centred on the practice of writing. Multimedia in the humanities today tends to employ massive resources to produce something visually impressive, but conceptually crude and inflexible. The projects described employ the "QuickBooks" process as outlined in Fritze & Marshall, 1995. An oral report will be presented on an exercise whereby students in the subject "The Connoisseurship of Italian Landscape Painting" could produce their own multimedia projects as part of their course work. The paper below describes an experiment in using multimedia techniques to create a new genre of writing in art history. It presents a different model from the more familiar deconstructionist one developed by hypertext theorists, and may be described as "ArteFactual". Rather than being based on a reading of hypermedia as a technological expression of the "death of the author", a phenomenon central to postmodern culture according to deconstructionism, it is based on the principle that the multimedia artefact should have the completeness and integrity expected in traditional models of the work of art, and should aspire to a certain timelessness in its construction which insulates it from the shifting sands of technological change. A navigation model called "flexible branching" will be presented as a means of achieving these ends, together with a demonstration example called Claude Lorrain's "Landscape with the Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli".
