Introduction Foucault defines 'discourse' as the medium by which ideas are exchanged (Wikipedia, 2004). Scholarly communication in the Humanities and the Cultural Studies heavily depend on the discursive nature of knowledge creation. changes over the centuries altered not only the communicational culture of scholars regarding their archives and text production strategies but also the communication situation in society, thus causing scientific, artistic, and societal paradigm shifts. The DFG-funded interdisciplinary Collaborative Research Center Media and Cultural Communication was founded in 1999 to study the nature and impact of media use and change on the discourses in cultural and scientific communication. Supported by historical analysis of media use, our project within this Center intends to create new workplaces for scientists in the 21st century. These interdisciplinary workplaces will influence the way scientists organize knowledge and cooperation within networked hypermedia information systems. Research and results will also have impact on the organization of social, economic and politic knowledge organization and cooperation patterns like the organization of public debates. Supporting communication and knowledge creation in digitally networked cultural science communities represents a specific challenge for the development and organizational structure of hypermedia information systems. Several years of cooperation with scientists from different disciplines in the humanities and the cultural studies have revealed at least three main requirements: 1. Semantic Freedom: The discursive nature of knowledge creation in the humanities, based on an intense exposure to hypermedia artifacts and underlying theories, requires support of different digital media to be combined with (almost) arbitrary metadata which characterize the situational background of an artifact. These digital artifacts are reifications of actual discourses and have special semantics for each user and each community of practice (Wenger, 1998). The situational backgrounds belonging to an artifact can be quite different depending on the scholar, her role in the community and her educational background. Concepts for dynamic hypermedia context management with a high degree of semantic freedom are thus needed for scholarly communications in the humanities. 2. Openness of repositories: This is an indispensable prerequisite for scaling such systems beyond the purposes of one community of practice. Scientific discourses in an informed society could not be isolated in the ivory tower anymore. Interdisciplinary and networked work settings lead to more exchange within the scientific community as well with society, industry and the political system. Modern information system should allow scholars of any kind to check out and modify archives, and bring them back into the discussion, again fostering discourses by simultaneously assuring intellectual property. We are aware that this is not only a requirement of a class of systems but is accompanied by the transformation of the humanities themselves. 3. Fluidity of archives: A naive multimedia understanding--e.g. that hypermedia can transport knowledge--is insufficient, since complex interrelations between media exist as well as complex cultural interfaces to these media (Manovich, 2001). Multimedia repositories are a big advantage but the contextualized and meaningful management of hypermedia artifacts needs more advanced hypermedia management strategies (fluid archives) than the usual basic support for storage and retrieval on the basis of low-level feature descriptors implementing old-fashioned de-contextualization strategies propagated in state-of-the-art information systems for scholarly communications. In the remainder of this paper, we discuss related literature first. We introduce a theoretical reflection on knowledge creation processes in the humanities related to the use of different media. …