This is bonus blog and will remain open until Thursday, April 10 at 11:59 pm. Responses will be worth up to 15 points. In order to receive all points posts must be a MINIMUM OF 300 WORDS (this is about 1.5 pages of a double-spaced word document) and must show an in-depth discussion of the prompt. Responses are optional and all extra points will be added to your final grade at the end of the semester.
Discuss the process of creating your hypertext project. What was your goal in creating this project? Did you find that creating this project helped you to think about the text in a different way than writing an essay would have? What are the benefits and drawbacks to approaching a text in this way rather than in a more "traditional" way (such as writing an essay)?
Discuss the reasons for all your choices on design: colors, graphics, layout, and how these choices worked with the content of your hypertext essay. What element of your site were you most happy with? What part were you least happy with? Was there anything that you wanted to include in your website but were unable to due to technical issues?
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As I had anticipated, the hypertext project was a rather difficult project for our group. No one in my group had had any prior experience to working with hypertext, so I knew we were in for an interesting experience. Our goal for this project was to create a website similar to a labyrinth. We felt this would be best accomplished by creating a variety of links on our homepage that would connect to various sites. This way, navigating through our website would be an exploration, similar to that of the Navidson record. We chose the background of each of our web pages to be black, representing the dark and ominous hallway. In addition, we chose our font according to which character or event in the book we were discussing. For example, when I analyzed Johnny’s transformation in the book, I began typing in Courier New that was similar to Johnny’s font, but as I explained how he was becoming a part of Zampano’s story, I switched the font to Times New Roman, similar to Zampano’s font. Our homepage was also incredibly symbolic of the book. The numerous trees on the page represented the various doors and sections of the hallway. The trees were left unlabeled so that it was unknown as to which tree linked to which page. We hoped that the chaotic appearance of the homepage would create confusion to reflect on how the explorers felt as they searched through the hallway. Personally, I felt that creating the webpage caused me more frustration and confusion rather than a new insight on the book. Our group had numerous difficulties achieving our desired look for our web pages. However, I did agree with the actual assignment of choosing an element or section of the book and analyzing its purpose or underlying meaning. I feel that by completing this project and viewing other groups’ projects, I have made deeper connections between the authors, characters, and layout of the book which has allowed me to appreciate its complexity on a new level.
Oh, how many frustrations my group ran into. We probably spent two hours alone just figuring out where our pages were being published to; they got lost in some dark internet tunnel, one where we didn’t supply ourselves with a rope to find our way back. It was definitely an exploration that none of us had traversed before. But we overcame any difficulties, and our website turned out more or less how we wanted. The most frustrated part for me was the homepage. I had planned in using an image I created with paint, so that each tree would be a link. I don’t know if SeaMonkey is just not fancy enough or if flash is needed, but you cannot draw a box around an image to make a link. Instead, we had to cut out boxes from the paint image and create them as individual links, which included more than one tree, so it wasn’t as much of a maze as planned. Then the hard part was making sure that each box fitted next to each other, to make a cohesive whole. On the page, you can see that there is a part where they don’t exactly fit together. From there, each box linked to another page, which took some time to create. But that worked out in the end as well, with images that tied together elements from the whole book that revolved around the character’s lives (foreign languages, (ir)relevant quotes, shadow puppets, Navidson video tapes, etc). Centered in the middle was the Ash Tree house, which linked to a video of what was supposed to represent the documentary filmed inside the hallway. I tried recording a clip from the Blair Witch Project, but my Fraps wasn’t working right. Thanks to embedded codes on Youtube, I pulled one out that I found fitting. A man in the hallway find three cards and plays chess game of life with possible death, something we found as an interpretation of Navy’s Judgment or Redemption in the House that he found to be God. The whole, page was an attempt to incorporate all means of communications (images, videos, hypertexts, literature). There were also problems with Core FTP. Sometimes it wouldn’t allow for pages to be edited or published, but with extra devoted time, we managed to be past those barriers. Having never worked with html in my life, I’d say that this project educated me more than I had expected. I’m well on my way to make to own webpage, but I think I need to learn flash.
Creating a hypertext project was definitely one of the most unique projects I have done throughout my college career. It was fun to do something different, especially from writing papers. However, the project definitely had its up and downs from technology, being in a group, and the book being crazy itself! As far as difficulty, I found the project a lot less complicated than I had anticipated while in class. Seamonkey really made the project easier to complete. However, there were some technical difficulties with getting pages to show up, links to connect, and organizing the page. I personally found the project very limiting as far as creativity for me because I did not know how to do anything fancy. My pages were basically title, picture, text, and link. I love being creative and making things look fancy so it bothered me that I was unable to do some of the things I would have liked to do with the project. While on the topic of my page, my group chose the background color but we were all free to do whatever we wanted with the pages past that. I chose any color fonts that would show up on our background and just ran with it since using color was about as creative as I could get! :) We also chose to link our pages in a pattern that followed smoothly rather than just from the homepage and out to our sites. We worked as a group and met three times to get on the same page and discuss things to make the project the best it could be. It was helpful to be in a group in the aspect of having someone to turn to with questions but I enjoy single projects more. Overall, I really enjoyed the hypertext project because it allowed me to analyze the book differently than I would have. Because we had specific sections it allowed you to focus on a particular part and really break it down rather than trying to put the whole book together. I thought it was a very helpful way to analyze every aspect of the book since each group looked at different parts and had their own interpretations of the section they did. I definitely would recommend this type of project in the future because it allowed more in depth learning than a boring paper that no one other than the professor is allowed to read. I would encourage more teaching with seamonkey though so people can be more creative with their pages.
Creating a website was definitely no picnic. I’ve personally never had any experience with HTML formatting before this class. However, creating the hypertext project for House of Leaves wasn’t as difficult as it might have been had we been reading another novel. The benefit to representing House of Leaves was that a lot of the text in the book was already styled and formatted to drive certain points home. My goal was not only to analyze the most obvious themes throughout the book, but also to bring to light some of the more subtle concepts that Danielewski seemed to encrypt in his book. I think the easiest part of designing the project was putting the words down. I really had a lot to say about our section of the book and I had fun analyzing all the crazy things that happened. The most difficult part of the whole thing was trying to get each page to look the way I had intended. I remember about halfway through saving and FTPing webpages I was ready to give up. That’s about when I stopped caring about whether or not the picture was really in the center of the page or if the links were the right color. The main problem I had was that my HTML skills didn’t match my HTML imaginations. Luckily, the format of the book itself helped me out a lot. I was influenced by the layout of the text on Danielewski’s pages and attempted to mimic his style on the pages in the project. I think I was most satisfied with the random links I included. Not only was I trying mirror his style as far as text, but also the entire book. By including random, pointless links I was mimicking my own thoughts as I was reading the book itself. Having to flip to the back of the book to look up the significance of a certain photograph pertaining to a certain footnote written by a certain author about the Spiral Staircase…only to find out that it really had no effect on me actually absorbing the story. One thing I wish I had more time to do was the footnotes. Originally, my plan was to connect each of the pages by my group members with footnotes that kind of summed up the main themes in our section. I had intended on making a more extensive Glossary page as well. All in all, I’m pleased with the work I did. If nothing else, I at least know how to put a bunch of X’s on a webpage.
I was very nervous when we were first assigned this hypertext project. I felt that since I lacked HTML experience that this would be a major challenge. But, I actually enjoyed this project because it was much different from writing a traditional essay. With the hypertext project, you could show your analysis and views in a more creative style than by just writing a traditional essay. This project allowed me to be able to use pictures, fonts, colors and layout style to portray what I felt about the sections of the book that I covered. The downfall of this project was that it was time consuming in a different way than time used to write an essay. The time put into this project was mostly spent in checking to make sure that the layout of the webpage looked proper and that all the links worked correctly, where time spent writing an essay is used to make sure you cover all topics and reach the length requirement. I faced some challenges in linking the pages together but after some help I was able to clear up that problem. I do hope to learn more advanced HTML skills so that in the future I will be able to make a more complex webpage. Overall, I really enjoyed being able to share my ideas in a hypertext style.
I liked this project mostly because it was a group project in that we could work together to come up with different and new ideas. I feel that since it was a group project it turned out to be more creative than it would have been if it was an individual project because of all the unique ideas that the members introduced. The design of the web pages was determined by the group members. We chose to use dark gray as the background for all the pages because it represented the ash colored walls of the house. We chose to link them together in a random, maze-like way to parallel the labyrinth in the house and so that readers would be able to determine the path they wanted to follow. With our individual pages, we were allowed to use our own creativity to set them apart from the other pages. I chose to use the fonts used by Johnny and Zampano to differentiate the characters that I was writing about. I also made the layout of the paragraphs mimic how some of the text in the book was laid out in a random way. I was happy with how the whole project including the themes, layout, color, graphics, and ideas all fit together in a unique way. Even though we all composed our pages separately, our analyses flowed together which made the project more effective to the readers. There was not anything I was unhappy with in the final project. I was proud of the project that the group members and I made!
Our project started out, in my opinion with much confusion. Their were two reasons for this, one is that no one had a clue as to how to properly go about programming a site. The second was that no clear leader stepped forward at first. While we all met before actually programming the page to discuss ideas on what to write about and how to analyze certain ideas, when it came time to actually program it at first, we looked like chickens with our heads cut off. The good thing though is that in the end the project ended up being completed and looking absolutely stunning.
Giving the group a creative project helped us to look outside of the box. It required that we go outside of class and actually take time to analyze and research the text. Not only did this allow for good discussion in class but it allowed for truly deeper understanding of the novel. When I was given my two points to analyze about the novel (the minotaur and the blue box footnote) I was skeptical as to how to go about properly analyzing it. I understood that both had major tie ins to the “labyrinth” theme in the novel, and I wanted to incorporate that. Fortunately I had no idea just how deep that theme could extend in those two footnotes that, many I feel, would not have paid a lot of attention to.
With a project like this you are able to not just analyze the author’s style, but also try an recreate it. I feel this allows for much deeper understanding of the purpose than a traditional essay. Both my pages analyzed the novels theme of the labyrinth, both in different ways. One in the actual physicality of the labyrinth of the hallways, and the others in the mental aspect of a labyrinth. I did my best to construct them as mazes and extremely complicated, though I feel my first page did a better job in mimicking the labyrinth feel over my second page. All in all I feel my project did an appropriate job of capturing what I had intended it to, though if I could have added anything it would have been to my second page about the minotaur. I would have liked to add an image of the “beast” and would have made it a picture of Rosie O Donnell.
-Ben Farias
I had a lot of fun doing this hypertext project. I always felt like my understanding of the computer and the internet was inferior to all of my computer engineering friends. Doing webpages, made me feel like I now know a little more, especially about HTML. This project was easily something I was really into because it was on the Internet, and the book itself included some technology theme aspects. My personal goal was to simulate the randomness of the internet and technology today. I feel like the randomness in the book, such as all of the obscure references all linked back to its Internet origins. Also I wanted to give a sense how the references authenticity was in question throughout the book. Wikipedia and such are similar in that these facts can be completely made up. I definitely enjoyed doing this much more than an essay for a few simple reasons. I enjoy doing visual projects over straight text writing ones. Also, doing the hypertext is like building a puzzle for someone else to do. I find it much more engaging and fun.
The overall goal for the visual effect of the webpages was to have the same background color. It was ash grey to symbolize the house and truthfully to be different than using black. Also the links to different pages were meant to be confusing and circular. This is done to mimic the book and a maze. The layout was different for each person because the layout is constantly changing in the book as well. We did not feel to keep the same in this aspect. Finally, the images on my pages were all done by me on MS Paint. I really enjoy doing digital art on the computer with this very state of the art program. I tried to do the image in a humorous manner that also to reflect what the pages were talking about. I have to say my favorite part of doing the webpages was making hidden links to random pages and other pages of the project and doing the images. I really do hope that someone will try to look for the links since I had a lot of fun doing them. What I was not pleased with is the difficulty of matching the MS Paint color to the background color. I wish I had more HTML experience so I could make cool things like blinking text and other such things. Also it would be nice to know how to make the house on the front page look more like a house.
The goal in creating this project was to get my thoughts and analysis of my section across to the other people in the class. I think that this project was much more interesting than writing an essay because you could become just as creative with the way you presented your analysis, just as House of Leaves was creative. I think writing an essay would have been much more boring. I think I would have felt that I would need to use academic lingo and the same old techniques in supporting my thesis. Instead, the hypertext project allowed for more informality and therefore, ease in communicating your thoughts to the “reader.” In this project, you could tinker with different colors, contrasts, and stylistic elements when considering the best way to bring your ideas across. It was interesting to understand how the book varied the way the text appeared to the reader in order to emphasize the events happening to the characters in the novel. Just as Danielewski uses this style in his book, I tried to incorporate the style encountered in my section into my web pages. The only drawback I could think of for this project was that in order for anything to be created, one must understand the use of HTML coding and editing. However, programs such as SeaMonkey made it a lot easier to work on this page at home. On the other hand, HTML editor was much more confusing and even if I did understand the coding and everything was on point, the program seemed determined to erase any new codes I entered and tried to entirely alter the look of my page than how it was intended.
My group decided on a dark grey background because it was representative of the dark ash walls of the hallways in the house. I used courier font in Johnny’s page because Johnny is represented by the same font in the book. I used a more feminine font for Pelafina because that is how her font came across to me when I was reading her letters. When I inserted my own analysis to her page, I used Zampano’s academic font because Zampano is always analyzing some other character’s life. In general, there was light, light grey font for ease of reading with contrast against the background. Just as Pelafina went mad and her writings ended up all over a page, I put some of my text like “crazy” and “paranoid” on the page in the form of a circle because whenever one considers an insane person, they state that there are a few screws loose and in order to loosen a screw, you must turn it in a circle. The words that were in the circle form emphasized Pelafina’s insanity. I used some purple font on Pelafina’s page because in the 2nd color edition of the novel, there was some purple font used for words by Pelafina. For the most part, I used a table or a simple paragraph style set up to be as organized as possible or maybe as unorganized as possible, considering the layout of the novel itself, when presenting to the class. I used images on Johnny’s page to emphasize a certain theme or a major idea that I found in reading his journal. The title of the page is on a bloodied background because Johnny’s thoughts are so horrifically violent in this section. Also, I included a picture of a husky because I thought it was important to realize the transformation of Johnny from the middle of the novel to the actual end, one year later. I wanted to include text that outlined the webpage and wrapped around the border just to be more creative, but I had no idea how to go about doing that.
I think hypertext project would be a good, informative way for students to discuss their findings of a particular novel of there was more in-class time to complete the project. As college students, we all take classes a different times, days and locations. In addition, some of us have jobs, internships and other obligations that consume the majority of our out-of-class time. It is extremely difficult to get five students together, especially during a busy exam week, multiple times to work on a complicated project. If one person can’t meet because of justified excuses, it just looks like they didn’t put as much effort in or didn’t care when in reality that isn’t the case. I think the hypertext project could have been a more valuable experience if we had in-class time to work on it (so we could ask the instructor questions) and everyone would be able to be there, since we are required to for class anyways. In addition, while getting to know new people is great, working with people you already know is generally easier because you know their schedules, work ethics and flexibility.
My goal in creating this project was to learn how to build a basic Web page and to visually portray my thoughts and feelings on House of Leaves. I think the project did let me think differently because it is more of free-style writing. Essays are graded so harshly and more so read for accuracy where as Web sites are viewed for their appeal and honesty. You can express your feelings and not be worried about technical errors.
I was most happy with our home page, I thought the X’s were pretty awesome with the randomly placed links. I was least happy with the simplicity of my personal pages, but my lack of HTML knowledge and the difficulties of meeting and retaining members in our group played into that. I would have loved for my page to be more complicated looking and have more pictures like other peoples, but the member of our group who knows how to do those things had to drop for personal reasons.
Overall, this hypertext project was a rather interesting venture into the world wide web. I have to say, making a web page is not on my list of “things that I am amazing at”. After our group spent several hours trying to master the skill of publishing a webpage we had it all figured out! I have to admit, it seemed so easy in class, but when it came down to crunch time, we had some minor technical dilemmas. Moving along to House of Leaves (I hope that is underlined, I still struggle with html), if anything would be a showstopper with some html, it would have to the infamous HOL. I’m really glad we were able to analyze HOL in an alternative way to an essay in this because it allows for more creativity and doesn’t put so much pressure on individuals. I had a tough time remembering all of the names, and not confusing anything with intricate plot and changes from Truant to Zampano to whatever else was in that book. I would change my font and other things in this blog post but I don’t know how to do that (Seamonkey makes life easy… except on blog posts). It would be really neat to have some serious commentary on HOL in one font and then my less than desirable opinions in a type writer font. To me, this was much more appealing than writing an essay due to the fact that we could use creative elements in lieu of dense literary analysis; which will be coming in the next paper… brace yourself Lacy! House of leaves from an html standpoint makes for a rather interesting presentation, I chose to space out my font similar to that of Danielewski’s to imitate his style and stress my points that I chose to make. I feel that when the text is spaced out, the pace increases rapidly and a sense of suspense builds greatly to the point of literary tension. I believe Ben stated it well when he referred to the intricate spacing as “literary onomatopoeia”. As I declared in class, I thought about creating a bunch of links leading the reader to a race for knowledge. However, I figured I would screw something up if I did this, ultimately leading to my embarrassment and a deep state of depression. I would not want to lead the life of Johnny Truant and have to become a drug addict, so I just left it up to some spacing and major scrolling of the page.
For our website, my group wanted to reflect the feeling of being lost in the endless hallway located in Navidson’s house. It is dark grey and difficult to see clearly, changes size and shape, has many doorways leading to more hallways and dead ends, and contains one central staircase leading an unknown distance downwards. These combined factors lead to a sense of uncertainty and ambiguity. To show this in our group’s homepage, we included the “forest” of different trees that acted as links to different pages and a central house. You never knew where one tree link would take you as opposed to another; some links led to each individual’s webpage, and some led to random images or pages related to our section of the book.
This hypertext approach to analyzing the text was clearly very different from writing a traditional essay. I liked it better because we were able to visually present our ideas as a group to the class and take an active leading role in discussion. We were also able to employ more visual aspects, such as including relative images and mirroring the text format Danielewski used in House of Leaves, in our project instead of relying solely on lines of words to communicate our ideas. Since these unique options were available to us, we were required to analyze the text from all of these different angles. We were not restricted to only words on a paper, but needed to include visual aspects as well in layout, format, and images.
As a whole, I was very happy with my group’s webpage. Each of us looked at a different aspect of the text and interpreted it thoroughly. My favorite part was our homepage with the hidden links among the forest of trees leading to unknown and unpredictable web pages. You might click in one area and see a confusing language, another link may lead to someone’s analysis to present, yet another link and whoa! There is a picture of a dead dog. I also really enjoyed being able to format the text in different ways to reflect action and ideas in House of Leaves. I had never before read a book where unique formatting was used in such a way, so I liked being able to include this interesting twist in my own web pages.
Personally, I had a very difficult and frustrating time using “SeaMonkey” and “Core FTP” to load my conceptual web pages onto the internet. Since no one in my group was familiar with html and creating web pages (myself most definitely included at the top of this list), we spent hours trying to figure out how to complete this process which took as long as (if not longer) actually writing up my analysis and coming up with my images and formatting. For this reason only, creating a webpage seemed almost purposeless. I really did like our project once it was done and we were presenting it, but creating the webpage from all of our work seemed too difficult as we were working on it. Even though I had some difficulties actually loading my web pages onto the internet, I am happy with how our project turned out.
This was the first time I was required to do a group project in a hypertext manner. From the beginning it seemed like it would be an interesting experience. Luckily my group had someone who had a bit more of experience with websites than the rest of us. That made making the project a bit easier yet it still was difficult to decide exactly what we wanted the page to look like and say. We decided to make our page give off the impression of “what is behind door 1, 2?” We decided to make our homepage a compass that when clicking on north, south, east or west would take you down a hallway that would end up leading you to two doors. Then clicking or either door would take you to different themes that we chose to discuss. We chose to keep the background a black color with white writing not only to make the writing stand out and easy to read but also to keep the darkness and scary feelings that are felt when going down the long hallways. We also chose to follow what was constantly seen and stood out in the novel, that of the word house being in blue. Throughout or whole website the word house was in blue. In addition when writing quotes from the novel we made sure to use the correct font. Such a when using text from Johnny the font was changed to Courier New. We hoped that the dark background and the various amounts of doors gave off the feeling of confusion such as in the novel when walking through the hallway and seeing endless amounts of doors without knowing whether or not to go in. Personally putting this project together was an interesting experience that enabled me to express what I wanted to get across freely without being restricted by correct essay formatting. This project enabled us to write out message in a way that imitated the novel including being able to change fonts and write towards the left of the page and then towards the write. We were also able to experience what the author felt when trying to get his message across. I believe that it was appropriate to use this novel to create the project because of the way the novel is written and the different writing style that are incorporated. Although a major drawback is that creating the webpage can be a bit confusing and at times takes up more time just trying to make it look nice than the actually incorporating writing. Being able to actually click on the doors to go into different rooms of themes was probably what I was the happiest with. One thing that I would have wanted to include was the use of sound. Including a slight creepy rhythm playing in the background would give the page a more eerie feeling. Besides that I was very happy with the webpage because it looked very well for being one of our first times putting together a webpage.
Karen Esquives
Our website was largely based on the book in many ways. I was glad to have a project that involved interactive website creation rather than paper writing. Writing a paper, much like a traditional book, can be very limiting. In many ways, I believe that is a huge reason why authors are branching out into radical new ways of writing such as those seen in House of Leaves and Patchwork Girl. I really wanted to create informative pages, but in a way that very closely mirrored House of Leaves as I saw it. My actual text contains informative information about the book, but the real message contained in my portion of the project came in the way that the visitor has to interact with the pages and the way that the content was laid out. I chose the text fonts to represent the difference between my ‘main’ page, which had the tone of a more formal essay but contained little information, and ‘my’ page, which had a more ‘Johnny’ tone and contained more real information than the main page. I would have liked to hide the “hidden” link from the first letters of the first five footnotes, but we were unsure of how to create the hidden links. In all, I am very pleased with the way the website turned out. It has a neat, concise layout that is very user friendly and easy to follow. Each individual site has a clear link, in the form of a house picture, back to the project’s main page. The only frustrating part of the presentation was the immovable toolbar on the main computer sending the image to the projector. I know that our group wasn’t the only group to have a problem with that, but if a group had put a critical link at the very bottom of their page, their website would unfortunately have problems due to the computers in the classroom that they would not have had at home. In all, I had a great time putting this project together. It was good to work with a group, and to work with a much more malleable medium than pen and paper can often be.
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