You will complete four projects this semester. The first three projects will 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: course revision policy
see Schedule (for due dates)
In the meantime, here are brief descriptions of the projects you'll be doing:
- Project 1: Your Home Page
- 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: Memory Archive
- Barthes suggests that images arrest our attention with marginal
details—obtuse meanings—that exist beyond easy interpretation.
The Doll Games and La Jeteéshow us how we can combine those arresting details
with evocative language. Project two asks you to create your own memory
archive, combining striking images with evocative text to give your
readers a new sense of your
topic.
- Project 3: Tactical Appropriation
- 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
- 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.
