Hypertext Essay Reflection

Reaching almost towards the end of the semester, it is always good to reflect back on the assignments that we did. In the previous course, Writing Media Text, every assessment includes a reflective statement which helps me to realize what are my strength and weaknesses.

Well as for this course, the final assignment is the hypertext essay which is still in production, I find that the easiest aspect of the hypertext essay task would be the writing the content. At first it was hard for me to structure the content because writing for hypertext essay is definitely different than the long traditional essays. All I need to do was to keep in mind to be concise so I kept my content short and straight to the point. After completing the content and starting to work on the coding, I knew that was definitely the difficult aspect.

Meanwhile, the most difficult aspect is actually spending time understanding the codes. I borrowed a HTML tutorial book from the library and I had to slowly read the code and compare to the outcome. It is really time consuming because I had spent almost half the day just to put all the layout in and the alignment was still off. When I did my coding, I had to do it step-by-step so I know which part of the coding went wrong.

While creating this hypertext essay, it make me realize that working in a media/communication profession, it’s important to communicate the message effectively. That’s why when we create the hypertext essay, we have to construct and structure how we want to convey the message to our audience. What kind of experience we want to convey to our audience. It is the same concept when we work in the media/communication industry. We must know what the audience want and what we want the audience to know.

The Start of Project Production

I’m pretty happy with the progress we have make with our Hypertext Essay project. The weekly workshops we had the past 2 weeks actually helped a lot because it encouraged us to get some work done and Seth has been checking in on our progress. So this week, our group manage to divide the work among ourselves, who will be working on what page and getting all group members to agree on the finalized conceptual idea and sketches.

Basically all our ideas are there but the only thing stopping us is searching for licensed images to reuse. After the lecture on copyright, I find it so important to actually get permission to reuse images. Finding the proper image to use as backgrounds or as fillers can consume a lot of time! So for now, I have to get my text done and find images then I’m good to go and put it up on the web. Hopefully I won’t have any problem coding HTML. Everything seems pretty straightforward except it gets annoying if I left out a single quotation mark and it takes some time to find out what went wrong.

So let the production of Blue Frenzy’s project begin! Good luck to all of us. Go Blue Frenzy!

Thoughts & questions

There’s so many questions to consider in producing the hypertext essay. Writing hypertext is very different from traditional essay and we just got to wrap our mind around that concept. We no longer have to think of a beginning, middle and end but think of connecting the hypertext pathways through links bringing the readers to experience different things. This week’s lecture emphasized hypertext as a multi-linear reading and writing so I guess my group’s hypertext essay design would be non-hierarchical, linking to many different webpage that creates an online identity. From the discussion with my group members last week, we thought of creating a mock design of social networking pages.  Our ideas are still very vague as we just came up with the topic as a starting point of our essay. However, we must bear in mind that each webpage must have a context. Adrian mentioned that the webpage should contain a link to our contextualizing statement as people read in a multi-linear form, they tend to jump from one point to another.

Imagemap

Last week when Hugh showed us examples of hypertext essay from previous student blogs, I was curious on how the student manage to make one single image that links to different webpage. This was the example shown http://raws.adc.rmit.edu.au/~s3239750/hypertextessay/map.html.

Today I finally had some time to explore how to do it by following simple instructions from this book ‘HTML and CSS in 24 Hours’ which I borrowed from the library. See the results here.

The steps are pretty easy and I thought I should put it down as a blog entry for my group members to try it out as well.

Step 1 (Image):

- Choose an image

- Cut the image into vertical strips using Photoshop (or any image editor) and save each image separately

   ….           …..       …..       

- Place the images into the ‘Project’ folder using Cyberduck software. I randomly name my images that I’ve cut as “first”, “second” and so forth.

Step 2 (coding):

- Insert <a href /> tag to link to first image then <img src /> tag to insert image

Here’s an example of my HTML code:

<a href=”http://raws.adc.rmit.edu.au/~s3308292/blog2/”><img src=”first.jpg” alt=”Yu-Ann’s blog” title”Yu-Ann’s blog (click to view blog)” style=”border:none”/></a>

- The second part of the code with alt is just to attribute the image. I think it still works without putting that in. (I haven’t tried it out.)

- Continue doing the same code by just replacing the links and images.

That’s it! Don’t forget to save and upload the new page.

It’s really simple. I hope that I’ll be able to integrate this ‘imagemap’ into my hypertext essay project.

Planning for Hypertext Essay

Today Hugh discuss with us about our Hypertext Essay and how we should start planning our schedule for the hypertext essay process. So here is the weekly schedule:

(**IMPORTANT**)

Week 1: Read group member’s blog

Week 2: Come out with a concept.

Week 3: Get the content ready (images, text).

Week 4: Do coding

Week 5: Coding, testing the codes and fixing any problems.

Week 6: Hypertext Essay due on Friday. Fix any problems.

Annotated Bibliography #9 – Pre-production of hypertext essay

The purpose of this annotated bibliography is part of our research for the upcoming project on hypertext essay. In the post Main argument by authors, I mentioned that the authors argued that people’s way of thinking and writing changes when they use different tools. Comparing to how weblogs alters the way we think and write, producing a hypertext essay also alters our traditional way of thinking. We have to think out of the box as it is more than just writing on the web and incorporating it with links. Hogue (2010) mentioned that people read book text from top to bottom, left to right, front to back, but people don’t necessarily read hypertext in the same linear way. So reading a hypertext is different, it depends on each reader what they want to read first. In the hypertext essay, we will provide different links that will take readers to different websites, but not necessarily two readers will end up reading the same content because once they decide to click on different links, the content will be different.

Therefore, in the production of the design and the hypertext essay, we have to make use of our weblogs to document and archive our ideas. Our ideas written in the blog can be ‘single, small, insignificant ideas’ (Mortensen & Walker 2002) but that is the purpose of weblogs – it focuses on connecting our thoughts together which at the end will connect our thoughts and ideas for the production of hypertext essay. So, the emphasis of the extract that relates to the design and production of the hypertext essay is to document any thoughts that come to mind about the project. We never know how helpful a small paragraph of idea could be.

Besides that, the extract also states that ‘weblogs are densely interlinked’ (Mortensen & Walker 2002), which relates to the project because hypertext is all about incorporating the use of hyperlinks. So in the production of hypertext essay, we have to interlink the content to some of our research on this extract. In the same way of how it relates to weblogs, we are considered writing for an audience as it is publish in public for people to read, so we need to consider what information to share with the audience. These are also some other questions that came to mind when connecting the relation of the extract to the production of the hypertext essay. What words do we need to link so that it will give readers more information about our hypertext essay? How are we going to transit from one webpage to another?

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