African Population and AIDS

The French Book "African Population and AIDS" presented on Internet

Internet is widely reckonized as a major mean for disseminationg knowledge on an world-wde basis. Combination of flexibility, rapidity and interactive capabilities resulted in an essential tool. Convinced that Internet is not a concurrent to the printed book as a mean of disseminating knowledge, World-Wide Web can be a very useful complement. Such a complementarity remains largely to be invented: it is probably one of the major challenges to the scientific publishing industry --particularly in the social sciences-- for the near future.

Therefore, using the proficiency of researchers at the INED (Institut national d'études démographiques), a small experiment has been attempted with the publication of the book on African Population and AIDS in two different ways:
- a number of information relative to the book (covers, preface from Pr Marc Gentilini, table of contents, order form) is presented on the server of the Mortality, Health and Epidemiology Research Unit at the address http://sauvy.ined.fr/sida [HyperText Transfer Protocol] ;
- in addition, some of the graphs from the study by Nicolas Brouard on the demographic consequences of the AIDS epidemic are displayed interactively. This allows any reader from the network to modify the value of some parameters in the simulation so as to produce new series of original graphs, thus exploring more completely the data and analyses proposed by the author.

We hope that this experiment will be conclusive and will stimulate innovation.

François Gèze, Éditions La Découverte
14 October 1994