225 Magazine Article on My Artwork

I was surprised and honored to be interviewed for a local Baton Rouge Magazine, the 225 earlier this year. The article by Jeff Roedel just came out: Animal Kingdom.

I’m blushing at how much better it makes me sound than I feel! I think it’s especially misleading in how it makes me sound like I teach at L.S.U. instead of making me sound like the graduate student I am. Yes, I do teach as part of my graduate assistantship, but it’s certainly not the same thing!

In any case, I thought the article was relevant for this blog because it discusses how my work morphed into the desire to create a narrative website project, and even describes this project briefly in the last paragraph.

Experiments in Textuality, Design Reading, and “…the application of psychology in a visual and functional context.”

As I begin to formulate my various style sheets for control of placement and visual aspects of my narrative, I am considering the phrase experiments in textuality as well as the concept of design reading, which bring me back to the post I made yesterday about how “problems” (in my case narrative/plot) are solved with technology through the use of design or, as designer Jason Kottke put it, through “…the application of psychology in a visual & functional context.”

To me, that phrase means playing on the brain’s biases to problem solve. In my case, that means playing on the brain’s natural tendencies to suggest a potential storyline or storylines through my “database” of narrative paragraphs known as Contemporary Creative Nonfictions.

For the purposes of this website, I have narrowed down what I believe to be a few major visual/psychological biases of a viewer when they consider text. I based my decisions on common advertising and web page techniques to create hierarchy of content (which is really what CSS style sheets are all about.) See the article “Designing for a Hierarchy of Needs” for more information.

My main tools of enticing the reader to a particular area of the page, thereby starting them down a particular narrative path will be:

1. Typography: we all have favorite fonts, so this could play a role in our choices. Also, certain fonts are more easily readable (serifed vs. sans serifed.) Bolder fonts, larger fonts, and text in italics receive special attention.
2. Direction: Western cultures are trained to read “left to right,” but there are other ways of going through text such as “right to left,” “bottom to top,” “top to bottom,” “skimming,” and “plowing the field” (the ancient reading practice of “left to right, down, right to left, down, left to right, etc.)
3. Clickability: Viewers might be more interested in hypertext than text because they understand it will lead to more content/further explanation.
4. Color
5. The Text Itself
6. Spacial Hierarchy: Location on the page. This could mean things that come first appear more significant to the reader. Also, as a website viewing population, we are accustomed to the “Header, Sidebar, Content, Footer” grid-like layout of a webpage as well as the implied meanings of each of these areas.

Contemporary Creative Nonfictions will be comprised of 20 separate pages with the possibility of an additional “map” page for navigation. The first page accessed will contain all of the site’s information (a sort of display of the full “database” of action and characters from which the “story” will be created via reader choices in navigation.) Moving through this information by choosing what/where to click will take the reader to a specific piece of narrative on its own page.As the reader clicks on hypertext, they will in a sense be stacking and/or unearthing aspects of the narrative.

Each page itself is created out of simple “div” or “divider” tags wrapped around paragraphs of text, links or information. Viewed without CSS, the text would appear in the reader’s browser defaults, in a traditional hierarchy of Header, Sidebar, Main Content, Footer with the browser default color and size for text, links, background, etc. In addition to being able to navigate a path of one’s choice through the text and hypertext, the reader will also be able to “navigate” through a variety of styles by clicking on their choice of small, colored icons. By clicking on an icon, the information on the page will not change, but the styling of that information will alter accordingly. I.E., the color of the links, the location of the paragraphs, the background color, etc.

To summarize, C.C.N.F. is a “choose your own adventure pathway” style narrative which supplies the reader with a database of mini-narratives which may be navigated according to textual and psychological choices as well as aesthetic ones.

Brief Quote from Jason Kottke

Jason Kottke

I love this excerpt from web designer and liberal arts blogger Jason Kottke’s “About” Page:

“I believe that when people talk about solving problems with technology, what they’re usually talking about is solving problems with design…which is to say, the application of psychology in a visual & functional context.“
from The Exciting About Page, by Jason Kottke, accessed 27 April 2010.

Total Linkage

Today I am thinking that I might make every word, every snippet of text on my pages (or nearly so) should be a link in order to maximize the potentiality of the narrative. I will make the links to both internal and external sites, much in the way of the piece we discussed in class (which I do not remember the name of right now but will look up and update this post with) that was a detective story for a missing person. It even linked to real missing persons databases on the web with a page for the fictional missing person in the story.

In this way, I will be creating a web of both truth and fiction–a personal story net.

Some Interesting Links I found today:

1. Trace Archive, Online Writing Community
2. A PDF on Reading and Writing Fluid Hypertext Novels
3. An article declaring that “cybertext” has killed “hypertext.”
4. An argument for putting History documents into hypertext format
5. Excerpt from an interesting journal article: “Cybernetic Esthetics, Hypertext and the Future of Literature” by Molly Abel Travis; Mosaic (Winnipeg), Vol. 29, 1996

On “Contemporary Creative Nonfictions” Content

“By referencing what is real, or historical, a fictional narrative can speak in a powerful, full-throated way to the problems and issues of our time. And a wholly imagined tale, set amid the intricate and accurate details of a real place and time, can resonate with readers in profound ways. In short, drama is its own argument.”

I pulled the above quote from an article in The Times-Picayune online entitled “HBO’s ‘Treme’ creator David Simon explains it all for you” by David Simon, New Orleans, April 2010.

In this article, Simon discusses the mixture of Fiction and Nonfiction in his new HBO television series Treme, set in New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina. He argues for real settings, events, or times populated with imagined tales and characters, and how these two levels of reality may serve to bring further truths about our everyday, real life to the surface.

The texts I have been writing for this hypertext narrative website project are similarly populated by imagined, hybrid animal characters in the midst real locations of an undeveloped suburb in Winterville, GA and the political space of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. and real events such as biographical narratives and disasters such as floods (influenced by my experiences of Hurricane Katrina,) droughts (experienced in Winterville, GA) and other disasters such as the attack on the Pentagon, September 11th, 2001 in which I lost a close family member who worked there.

An Excerpt from my text in progress:
“Jacob Wolfe is the only centaur in the United States. He lives just outside of Winterville, in a neighborhood that no one has bothered to develop, staining his golden fur red in the clay, watching the moon travel across his piece of sky, eating the abundant does, drinking the algae-greened water. Fishing for minnows, licking salt from the dirt.”

Alternate Style Sheets

In terms of styling my web page (color, font size, font face, and so on,) I would like to put these options in the hands of the user or “reader,” as well. In order to do this, I have been learning about how to implement alternative style sheets and give the user the choice of which style sheet will control the styling attributes of the page they are viewing (see my earlier example of http://dylanjameswagner.com/ where you can change the colors of the page just by clicking on the tiny square graphics in the upper left-hand corner of the page.)

So far, I have learned to create alternate style sheets and how to have them accessible through the “View” menu on your browser menu bar by clicking on “View” and then “Page Style” and then selecting which style sheet you want to control the styling properties of the webpage you are viewing.

I am having trouble, however, putting this choice into the physical page itself as a hyperlink. The Lynda.com tutorials I’ve been using want me to pay more money to learn this new trick, so I’ve been searching the web for answers and have found that it can be done using Javascript. I found this site which describes the Javascript I might need: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/alternate/. I hope I can figure it out, as I think adding styling choices as another option would really help to make the site more dynamic and user-choice oriented.

Dubuffet’s Hypertext

“What cultured people want in terms of language (and thought) is to use well-defined, correctly positioned and strictly combined terms, and this is what they call good speech, good thought, and good writing. But they do not realize that they are thereby creating a closed circuit that leaves no room for anything but what was there in the first place…Contrary to what cultured people call good writing, it is by forcing the meaning of words, or else by shifting them; also by derailing coherent thought; it is by injecting gaps, disjointedness, margins, and deviations, that we will produce the soul phenomenon worth seeking: the contribution to thought of outside elements, the excesses of the final product over the original stakes.”
–Jean Dubuffet

Dubuffet wasn’t talking about hypertext here, but what he says above about creating an “open circuit,” as Nam June Paik would say, as opposed to a “closed circuit” by introducing “gaps,” “disjointedness,” and “deviations.” Hypertext is a perfect way to write within this new idea of grammar and syntax.