We will be meeting in the lab on Tuesday (Dec. 2). As the syllabus states, you will be doing short presentations on your semester projects on Tuesday and Thursday. I will be picking people at random, so that means everyone needs to be prepared with their presentation on Tuesday, not just those at the top of the alphabet!
Your presentation should be 3-5 minutes. You’ll want to give a basic description of your project, and what it will look like when it’s finished. Having something visual to show would be great, though, obviously, you don’t have to present a finished project. Showing something like a table of contents page, or an opening page or entry, would work.
You’ll want to say something about the interface or navigation structure of your project. You’ll also want to discuss the medium you have chosen to work with, and how that medium affects your story or poem. (For instance, if you choose to work with a wiki, how does the fact that other people can change what you’ve done affect how you tell your story—or does it? If you choose to work with hypertext, how does random navigation and a non-linear narrative affect how your tell your story, and how others read it?).
In your presentations, as in your project “manifestos,” you’ll also want to address some of the concepts we’ve dealt with in class. Interface and medium are two concepts that will apply to everyone’s project. There are other concepts that will apply to some projects, but not others, such as multimedia, interactivity, immersion, and database (your project, to qualify as a digital object, must deal with at least one of those four, but not necessarily all four).
I’m intrigued by many of the projects that you’ve emailed me about, and look forward to hearing more about them in your presentations.
See you on Tuesday.
Joseph Byrne
ENGL278W
