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Your projects and my project

Submitted by silversprung on 4 December 2006 - 8:32pm.

I've been thinking about my own project in a few different ways after seeing what other people have been thinking about this semester. (I guess that is one of the points of presenting, huh!)

crashingintowalls' post and presentation this afternoon struck me because his role in his final project is so different from mine. I am like the control-freak mother who creates and nurtures my baby of a hypertext. (Wow-- that analogy was creepier than I meant it to be.) One of the things that seemed to define crashingintowalls' relationship with his project, in contrast, was the lack of control that he had over it-- although he certainly desired that control.

I've also been pondering (after tophat1's presentation) how my own identity is wrapped up in/defined by/changed by my hypertext. I mean, yes, my Appendix is inside the hypertext-as-neigborhood (and by extension, so am I.) But some of my characters' thoughts/ideas are also my thoughts/ideas (and in a certain sense, all of their thoughts are my thoughts.) Does this make the characters my avatars, in a way? Or do avatars have to be characters you create for the express purpose of becoming them, or identifying yourself with/as them? I guess I need to get myself clear on what exactly qualifies as an avatar.

Also, a random observation I noticed during class today: it seemed like everyone who was doing projects with a lot of writing (either creative or critical-- not that the two are mutually exclusive) had clearly devised some sort of navigational system for the text. No one wanted the reader to be flying blind, so to speak (me included.) Is this because we all hate ceding our control over things? Is it because online writing without any meaningful way to navigate just isn't ever good? (I feel like I should really be able to come up with counterexamples to that hypothesis. I know that it's certainly not the case that having a way to navigate automatically makes a hypertext or other online narrative good.)

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I agree; the variety in the

Submitted by Pimm on 4 December 2006 - 9:50pm.

I agree; the variety in the presentations today was fascinating!

As a person who did the critical approach, I can answer your question from my own viewpoint. With the critical approach, it feels especially weird to not direct my user in some way. Maybe this is a result of me being too stuck in the mindset of what a traditional, academic paper looks like, but I also can't really imagine a reader wanting to go at my paper from any angle. I mean yes, I suppose a reader can pick whichever LiveJournal entry she or he wants to read, and that may work (if she wants to, for instance, read only about diaries in the 18th century), but I can't imagine not putting my entries in order and (through that order), somewhat guiding the reader. As a critical essay, wouldn't that be completely confusing to have the history, thesis, random thoughts, etc all jumbled up in no particular order? Or am I just stuck in the traditional mindset?

So..yes, I suppose it's a bit of selfishness, but I would say my orderliness is done more out wanting to help the reader than control her or him. : )

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As for the navigational

Submitted by marmalade on 5 December 2006 - 1:15pm.

As for the navigational systems--I agree with Pimm. There is some essential guidance that needs to be given (obviously this my opinion) when presenting/writing/devising a critical paper. While it might be sorta cool to think that one could construct an argument that didn't need to be linear to prove its point, I don't find it terribly realistic. Good critical arguments have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And while there is some degree of fluidity allowed, the sense of building to a final "of course!"--the proven argument--couldn't really work if the whole thing were absolutely jumbled about and random.

For me, it was really cool to link backwards and forwards between different posts--different chunks of my paper. I felt as though it really helped to prove my point, remind the reader of things I'd said before or indicate places I was going--but that didn't mean that one post that relied upon the thoughts developed in another, earlier post could be taken totally out of context and still make sense, or still "prove" my point.

Now, the question is, does what I've just written make sense? :)

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