Digital Oak Park: an experiment

This essay describes an attempt to convey anthropological knowledge by an innovative means. Combining text, photographs, and video clips in a nonlinear fashion, these four ethnographic portraits explore aspects of Oak Park, Illinois, an upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago renowned for its success in creating and maintaining ethnic diversity. The portraits explore the impact of this diversity among Euro-American, African American and lesbian families. One of the portraits examines the Oak Park Regional Housing Center, the cornerstone of the village's integration efforts. This experiment is offered as an alternative to the more common means of publishing scholarly research – the book or the film.