Harris says such work has transformed the oral traditions field. "His steady march of original books, together with the journal and center, have brought things together into a coherent and pretty systematically studied field."

But Foley isn't resting on his laurels. In recent years, he says that he has noticed a certain isolation of researchers who study via the Internet, a state of affairs similar to the "library-centered scholarship" that he worked to overturn two decades ago. In January, he launched the Center for E-Research to, as he says, act as a "pituitary gland" for that budding field.

Foley peppers conversations about his research with the word "useful." The only purpose of scholarship is to be useful to others, he says, and then proceeds to tick off the relative use value of computer analysis, textual studies, field work and so on down the line.

Books, he says , are not as useful as we like to think, especially when employed to help literate people experience oral art. He readily grants that printed volumes are extremely good at storing chunks of reference material or, he says, in distributing thousands of verbatim copies of John Grisham novels. But books are less successful at communicating the complex nuances of a work of oral art, subtleties that -- depending on the setting, audience, moment in history and other factors -- can differ dramatically each time it's spoken.

Ironically, Foley believes it is the newest technologies that will be most useful in communicating this ancient form. The best way to offer literate people an oral epic, he says, is to transform text, sound and the metonymic content into a multimedia experience on the Internet.

Thus has Foley, in another first, just launched an "e-edition" of the 1,030-line "Wedding of Mustajbey's Son Becirbey." Foley's site includes a recording of a Serbian bard singing the poem-story (at www.oraltradition.org. Excerpts from the poem, along with other multimedia features, are available here.).

Visitors who don't understand the bard's Serbian tongue can follow the story in side-by-side transcriptions in Serbian and English. If they wish, they can also pause and click on hyperlinks to learn about words with metonymic meanings -- meanings that otherwise only scholars and native speakers would know.

"You can study these things or ignore them," Foley says. "It's like surfing the Web. If you'd like to know what's so important about coffee pots mentioned in the story, for instance, the link will tell you that they are a measure of a hero's strength and ability."

Foley's competence in communicating via both print and computers allowed him to conceive of his latest textbook, How to Read an Oral Poem, as a hybrid of both media. In the book's introduction, he invites readers to take the book in one hand and a mouse in the other. "Let each medium do what it does best," he says.

Earlier this year, Foley started work on another "book-plus" project, to be titled Oral Tradition and the Internet, which will explore his ideas about media in some unusual ways. As he is writing the new book, for instance, he will put drafts of the text on Web logs and incorporate bloggers' feedback into the eventual paper version. Foley says the book will be surrounded by e-editions, e-conferences and more.

His goal is to help the book's audience move beyond the limitations of the printed page and instead try to encounter ideas in different media simultaneously. "I want to challenge people to think of reading not just as the lock-step consumption we suppose it to be," he says.

Foley goes on to say that this project, and all of his work, comes down in the end to building an understanding and appreciation for human communication in all its beautiful, bewildering variety. His colleagues around the world echo the sentiment.

"The value of John's work, and in the humanities in general, is an understanding of what we share humanly," Martin says. "Such work may not help us go out and invent something right off the bat, but it's valuable because it tells us something important about a deeply human feature, about language in its natural state."