Each student will complete four projects this semester. The first three projects are low-stakes projects designed to help you learn your way around the practical and the theoretical sides of hypertext authorship. The fourth project is one of two large-scale collaborations that class members will work on. Check back to this page as the semester moves on to see the specific project assignments.

See also: the course revision policy.

In the meantime, here are brief descriptions of the projects you'll be doing:

Project 1: Your Home Page, due 5 October

What does it mean that everyone builds "home" pages on the web? What purpose do these digital representations serve? Why do we ground these pages in geography (my home) rather than our ego (my mind) or our experiences (my biography)? Using readings and the movie Memento, we will explore what it means to encapsulate one's public face for the world to see.

Project 2: Web Portal, due 26 October

A common approach to web design is the "portal," a metaphor that suggests physical passage and constraint at the same time. This project will think about web portals in the context of "interface." How do the interfaces we use affect our experiences of web texts? What interfaces work (and which ones fail) for Web Portals?

Project 3: Tactical Appropriation, due 23 November

Michel de Certeau suggests that despite the one-way nature of dominant media, we can (and do) appropriate and re-configure those media to our own ends. Project three asks you to consider the new media techniques of compositing, juxtaposition, and mixing to create a "tactical appropriation" of a dominant media form.

The Collaborative project, due 14 December

Having already experimented with hypertext and its rhetorical possibilities, our fourth project provides the opportunity to produce a more public, long-lasting work than we have yet done. The class will divide into two groups to produce an artistic/ aesthetic digital work that grapples with the ideas and concepts we've addressed thus far. The project will be done in four stages: proposal, working draft, rough draft, and final draft.