Repurposing Project

• Be sure you complete both Parts A and B below

A. The Project Itself.

This project is an experiment in repurposing a print document for the Web. On one level, it's easy to translate material simply with the click of a mouse: in Microsoft Word, for instance, you can simply choose "Save As Web Page" from the "File" menu, and the technical conversion is done, though the document may look very different from the original, and not very much like a Web page!

The challenge of repurposing is not really technical, but one of choice and design. What content needs to be on the Web? How does the presentation-and even the purpose-of the document change when readers of print become "users" on the screen, who expect the information to look and act like Web pages they're used to. A five-page plan for the Duluth Snowboard Club's annual trip to Montana during Christmas break, for instance, would become a dreary, 10-screen, black-and-white Web page with no links or pictures that no one would want to read (except maybe to print it out first). Who would want or need to read this plan online? What could these users do at this Web site? How would the original five pages be "chunked" and linked to enhance navigation? What about images or links to other Web sites?

Begin this project by finding a print document that supports or explains some local group, business, event, etc. This might be a brochure from a UMD campus service, an informational flyer about a local marathon, or the bylaws of a club. Be sure the document is extensive enough to give you material to create a set of Web pages, but that, in print, it is a single document. What you create in this project won't be an entire home site for the group, but perhaps a "subsite" linked to the home page.

Key to your choice of a print document is that your repurposing has a purpose-that the material you transform is actually of use to people there on the Web. If you take a pocket-sized, plastic-coated field guide to Minnesota trees offered by the County Extension Service and translate it into a set of Web pages, for instance, you might seem to be asking users to take their networked computers into the woods. A few could do this, but not many. Ideally, your repurposing will take advantage of the greater connectivity of the Web to make the material more accessible, understandable and useful.

B. Self Commentary

This is your chance to explain to me, your professor, the many ways that your demonstrates your grasp of the ideas and techniques we've been talking about so far.

Write a two-page (double-spaced) commentary on your repurposing of the print document. Try to specify and reflect on the principles or techniques of rhetoric and design you used. Claim credit for anything you see, even retrospectively, whether you were aware of using technique in your process or not. In this sense, your commentary may be partly a work of fiction, but, like all good fictions, it should lie convincingly to tell a greater truth.

Use and underline terms and ideas from Williams and Schriver to describe these principles and techniques (you might even use these terms as the headings of sections within the commentary). If you use terms from other classes you've had, underline them as well, and define them in a glossary at the end of the commentary. Also, discuss how your personal process and approach to this project exemplifies or combines the traditions of design that Schriver talks about on pages 55-97.

Be sure to mention and describe any models of good design or writing that you kept in mind as you worked on your revision of the ad. If you have questions or point of concern that you'd like me to ask your classmates to address during the workshop, please include these questions at the end of the commentary.