Textual Media

   ** Just a suggestion of something I ran across a while ago. It seemed relevant to mention an exhibit I had read about this August by Jane Cardiff.  It is an audio tour drawn from her memories but involving the museam and sculpture garden.  I was interested in going but have not made it yet so I do not know if it’s good or not.  However, it seems interactive and whatnot so if anyone is interested it is wed-sun 11:30 to 2:30 ( though it was three good thing I didn’t show up) and it is at the Hirshorn. Check it out here is the link: http://hirshhorn.si.edu/exhibitions/description.asp?ID=20 (for some reason the link button did not work)**

   The several examples in Marie-Laure Ryan’s, Narrative as virtual reality, of textuality were a bit overwhelming at first. I kept re-reading the title, isn’t that what I just read?  Seriously, I had no idea there were so many variations.  I am never surprised these days. It was helpful to break it all down into catagories that overlap and subsequently explain examples of often nebulous combinations. 

    I always enjoyed adventure games as a child and created stories and challenges to getting to my bed.  If I get to the covers quickly, or hop, I can escape various frightening figures introduced through movies and books.  This seems relevant for some reason to me as it seems playful this interactivity.  Strangely, I get excited when there is some choice or surprise involved even in educational reading online or otherwise. 

    It was good she explained ergodic some more because I needed a refresher.  I also found it quite interesting the way she explained the interactions and modifications children make when personalising stories they are being told.  The parent or guardian adds and creates images and the cild then has the specifications to see what they would like or explain differences from the paradigm.  Why is this ghost purple aren’t they supposed to be white? 

Marie-Laure Ryan explanation of textual media is very hard to follow because it is there are many variations and forms to textual media.  There are lots of new terms, definitions and criterias to keep track off.  I am impressed by the mapping of the different story outcome and paths one can take in a narrative with several decisions and multiple endings offer to the readers.  The some of the illustrations hep with understanding of her explanation of the different path but some are still confusing even with illustration.  The Vector with Side Branches and the Maze type of paths are easier to understand because they are more straightforward, but all the rest of the paths have lots of variations that make it hard to see how the narration will unfold. I need reread the article and ponder more on the reading. 

ahhhhhhhhhhh yes, and yet another lovely piece of literature analyzing the odds and ends of this clashing realm of literature and technology- a realm in which we’ve come to call ‘textual media’. And, as sarcastic as this may sound, I actually did enjoy reading, finding rather, pieces of this paritcular reading assignment to further understand textual media.   

It was interesting to see how people linked to other peoples’ stories and how they chose their links. I liked how Ann Luu linked her line “summertime is not what it used to be anymore”, namely, the word ‘summertime’, with Wes Shephard’s story “Neighborhood Lawns in the Middle of September”, which has a lot of focus on the departure of summertime. Some people found similarities between their stories and their classmates’ stories which they linked to. For example, Randall Ford’s “Swimming Through a Sea of Defiance”, was linked to my story, “When There Is No Story At All”. In both of our stories, the characters had fallen asleep and were wondering if they were dreaming, so Randall linked the words “fallen asleep” with my story.

There were also lots of links that demonstrated funny plays on words, like in Bryan Pierson’s “From the Deep Dark Cells of Isolation” where the “The photographs of a man sliced up in his basement” links to a picture of slices of bread. Another example of this is the word ‘bird’ which takes you to a link to Duck Hunt in Jennifer Parker’s “Cowering in the Darkest Chasms”.

Some people linked to certain pictures to help illustrate their stories or to draw attention to a specific object in their stories, like the illustration of the bridge’s entrance in Bertha Bey’s A Look Beyond the Bridge.

There were also links that made you re-think different elements of the story, for example, the use of the Virgin Mary in Jason Obenscain’s “Rock! Said Mary”. In this case, it makes you re-think who “Mary” really is.

The assignment over the weekend was to create links from our Calvino incipits that either had meaning, didn’t have meaning, enhanced or didn’t enhance your story.  For the most part, it seemed like most people had links that were just playing off the words they chose.  It did seem apparent that everyone had at least one or two links that were very enhancing to their story.  In particular were the words that were linked to another persons’ incipit.  An example is Ann’s story and how she linked it to mine.  At the end of her story, you sense that one of the characters was being chased by the law, only to get away at the last minute.  She linked the last sentence in her story to my incipit.  My story was about being in complete isolation in prison.  The link here may be subtle but I thought that her story was a segway in to mine, and it was a great choice of her to link it so. 

When reading these "choose your own adventure" stories, I was trying to think how there is a link between them and the hypertexts we made.  I guess you can say that we as the author of the hypertext choose where you go via the links.  In a way, the author of the short stories chooses your path as well, only I think the reader has a little more of a choice when it comes to the short stories.  I think that the short stories are a little more guided than the hypertexts.  The different paths in a "choose your own adventure" book also are all connected with one another and are both enhansive to the text as well as coherent.  The links to our hypertexts were at most times random and had little to do with the story itself. 

The process I used was to read my story then I looked for connection in the other stories.  Then I linked to those that I thought would continues my story.  I choose some without any thought on how it would lend itself to the overall text of my story and some I chose to match the words I highlighted and a couple I gave no thought at all to them. 
The incipit links are:
densely covered woods linked to a  web page titled Woods Hole Oceanographic was selected because the word woods came up in the title. I wanted to experience how that site would change my story.
joy of living text was selected because I felt that it expressed the joy of living and could bring back the character Bernadette.   
wind or vertigo was centered around a wind mill in the outback of some desert and represented the isolation that Bernadette and Cavedagna felt in their charade.

bridge’s entrance the image of a bridge was just to show a picture of a bridge.

Traversing Through the Winding Road links on the words suffocated and summertime add to the story line.  It gave the text other avenues that could be explored as new stories with in the title.  However the words daisy and accident really did not add anything to the original story text.

When There Is No Story At All links did not seem to have any connection to the story text to me;  however, someone with a good imagination could think up a story that could be weaved into the text to make it coherent.

Both, "Swimming Through A Sea of Defiance", and the story brought to us by Wes, provide interesting links; that is, links that hold or maintain the readers interest in the outcome of the story. Everyone chose to use the power of imagery as their tool for linking story to emotion; emotion to thought. In all, the links of both writers reveal a part of them, as shown by the particular sites or images each writer chose to take the readers to. And yes, such choices do add to the development of their stories.                               

"Traversing Through the Winding Road," by Ann Luu, had a few links that were linked to pages with what I felt to have meaning behind them.  It also seemed like a few of the links were linked to pages or images that had to do with the word itself, or had at least the word in it.  An example is the word "suffocate" which she used to in her text to describe the intense heat the character was experiencing.  The link was to an article about children suffocating due to plastic bags.  Another of example of how she did this was with the word "daisy."  I liked this example because it linked straight to a page with meanings of every flower you can think of.  This didn’t add to the story at all, but it did divert my attention away for a few seconds.  With this being said, I think that it took away from the coherency, and the meaning.  However, it is quite clever and a good example of thinking outside the box.  Overall, I’d say that all the link-destinations were representative to the words they were linking from.

Philip Miller’s incipit entitled, "Across the Dark Expanse," used links that had the word in the linked-destination.  For example, the word "captain" was linked to the official web site for Captain Morgan’s rum.  The word "icebreakers" was linked to Hershey.com.  Hershey is apparently the maker of Icebreakers Liquid Ice breath fresheners.  Other links were a little more involved such as the word "Knights."  It was linked to the Maryland Renaissance Festival.  Knights can be found at a renaissance festival.  Overall, I didn’t feel like it took away or contributed to the story.  It was still coherent to me as well.  It is pretty much the same thing I did for my own incipit.

    The story, "Where There is No Story at All" by Jackie was adept use of imagery which made just enough sense and brought that edge I had hoped to find.  She chose interesting flash productions which were stimulating with out distracting from the inevitable narrative.  I had hoped to find some of these kind of visually appealing interactions but lost a couple URLs I wanted to use.  I enjoyed the clock where th hand keeps erasing and rewriting the minutes as they pass in constant cycle. Yes, and the 5 minute sideburns were very funny and to me it was like at this moment when the author was abandoning you in suspense she was laughing at you HA HA! No ending for you! 

    Some like Lindsey’s The Drawn Pavement of October Nights  were somewhat straight forward illustrations of the word used.  There was an image of Army recruitment for the word Army and a camaro for camaro. It was imagery toward the visualization of the narrative.  However the first, ketchup was linked to a site which had a funny political message.  The bottle has a picture of Geoge Wahington and is called "W" that seems to represent george (duba-u as people call him) Bush and it was for fallen soldiers.  It seemed to be in line with some of the words she chose to link, such as army. It was an interesting direction as she was writing about discrete assignments for some organization. 

  Once it was discussed, I begain thinking about why we did not choose many texts (aside the ones required to link to).  I suppose my particular reasoning is that it would be drawing away from the original text but I guess it is more Calvino’esque to do so.  I think Lindsey’s Linked at the end to another which I had not considered during the assignment as Calvino always does so.  I tink it would be interesting to encorporate mor sounds with the linkage. I would have linked "The wind cried mary" by Jimi Hendrix to Jason’s.  However, I like the visual as well so I suppose the only way to integrate the two would be through creating the pages yourself as opposed to outside links that are out of our control.  Anyway I enjoyed this project but especially exploring the other creations and various takes on the assignment.

For this assignment i first read Ann Luu’s story.  I would first like to say that the suspense that was present in this story was very strong, she kept the reader very in the dark until the end of the story.  As far as the choices for links went they were fairly simple and strait forward.  I dont think they added to the story, but they didnt really take away from it either.  I suppose that she could have linked the words as they were expressed in the story to more relative links.  For example she could have linked "tickets" to a link about boat tickets, since that is the kind of ticket in the story.  The second story I read was by Bryan Pierson.  This story was also very enjoyable to read, and its cut off point left the reader unsatisified with not really knowing what happened, or if he really did it.  The links that are present within Bryan’s text are not really relative to the story at all, but this does not necessarily take away from the story, it actually lightens it up a bit and contrasts what you might expect.  For example when i clicked the word sliced within his text i was expecting to see some bloody body, intead i saw a cartoon image of sliced bread, it was a interesting surprise.