Here's my idea/question for the critical photo essay:
How does the reader’s experience of moving through a
hypertext such as a website affect the meaning of that text?
This question that I would like to examine focuses on the
contribution of the reader toward the meaning of a text that may not follow a
linear path. On this topic, I have been thinking of two books that attempt to
change the reader’s experience by not conforming to a certain genre (in these
cases, the visual layout of a novel); House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski presents a new visual layout to each page
of his book. Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer has actually constructed his book in a way that defies our sense of
time and genre in that each page has spaces in sentences actually cut out so
that words from following pages appear through, and the meaning is determined
by what lays ahead and also by what lays behind. These two books, however,
still depend on the complete construction by the author, and the reader most
likely will choose to start at the beginning and turn each page to reach the
end – thus being led in a predetermined way by the author.
To answer my question, I hope to build a website, or at
least a series of links, much like what we know as a “Choose Your Own Adventure”
children’s book. The user can then navigate through each page, having multiple
options of which page to choose next, or even veer off course to different
websites.
The main challenge I see with this proposal is how to
demonstrate or assess how each of these changes affects the outcome. It may be
accompanied by a short text illustrating a few different paths that a user
might choose. Or the purpose of the website may be simply to demonstrate the
dual effects of intertextuality; that a text is simultaneously deconstructed
and constructed by its different elements. Much of that depends on the contents
of each page and the progression of the site.
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