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Computer science from A to Z
M is for Multimedia
Texts, drawings, photos, music, films... culture takes many forms, all of which are now accessible via a computer: welcome to the multimedia age!
Just as our municipal libraries now stock not only books but also music and films, our computers have learnt to manage a wide variety of documents.
But information technology goes one better than your local library, because it is able to establish links between these different types of content, be they present on your computer or accessible on the Internet. Imagine you are reading a scene from Corneille's "Le Cid". In a single click, you can view a biography of the author, find a portrait of him, listen to actor Gérard Philipe at the Festival d'Avignon, or watch an extract of the film version of the play.
Thus, the reader of a multimedia document can move around at his own pace, following his own route through very diverse content. This is a new way of approaching reading, entirely different from that adopted with a traditional printed book.
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