Thursday, October 2, 2008

Project Two Final With Metatext


View Larger Map



My second project is a cross between a comedy and a mystery. I tell a narrative through the character of my WVU hat, although he never refers to himself as a hat, as far as the reader is concerned he is just a totally normal guy searching for his parents. This is important because the only clues the reader has to knowing the identity of the narrator are the multimedia elements of the project—the pictures and the video. This works to explode the conventional idea of the narrator and show that as writing progresses technologically, the need for these technological advances also increases. You wouldn’t want to read a whole mystery without knowing the main character was a hat, but without the integration of the video and images with the text (all in first person) it would be impossible to determine the identity of the narrator.
My project also emphasizes the idea of a sequence when writing, and it does this in several ways. First of all, it is a mystery narrative, so it progresses logically from beginning to end, although the reader does not know all the details of the story as he is hearing it, because the speaker in fact does not know all the details. The story is written as a sequence of journal entries, and each journal entry has a place on a map along with a date and a story specific map marker. Each journal entry then has links within it to give broader details on the story—pictures, videos, emails, and search results are linked unobtrusively from here. I wanted to emphasize the map, so instead of each journal entry linking to the next one, there is a link at the bottom to “return to table of contents,” symbolizing the need for the reader to understand that the story progresses in a specific order, even when details about the story are unclear.

0 comments: