Schedule
January
February
March
April
May

Personal Home Page Project

A. The project itself

The front page of a personal site must answer an interesting problem: you have many selves, depending on where you are and who you're with, but on the Web you're everywhere at once, and with anybody and everybody. How does the content and design of your front page

In this project, you will use Dreamweaver and Photoshop to create a personal home page--the front page of your personal home site, whether you have one or not--which will use the techniques of Web design and "New Media Writing" to find, represent and connect the multiple identities you've developed. We all have these multiple identities because, in life, we've constantly been called upon to define ourselves in different contexts:

1. with our families (both blood relatives or more provisional, chosen families, e.g., the street),
2. in school (K-12, and in your non-major collegiate experience),
3. in our profession or discipline,
4. and in relation larger historical cultures (represented by the entertainment industry or other cultural institutions like the church).

These identities are always, at once, flowing from the past and being maintained and reinvented at the moment.

If we were working in print, you would describe and organize the relations among these selves and these contexts in an autobiography, which would use the techniques of narrative, retrospective analysis, literary point of view and verbal argument to show all these selves as a coherent story.

In this Web-based project, however, you will need to use hyperlinks, images, text, visual themes or metaphors, etc. to suggest the connections among these identities (1-4 above) in a non-narrative way. By doing so, you'll be answering the challenge--common to many civic or commercial Web sites as well--of needing to speak simultaneously to multiple and divergent audiences without confusing or alienating any one of them.

Though you may compose many specialized pages and sites to represent you in getting a job, organizing a club, or tracing a family history, this personal home page is the hub that connects the various yous without entirely erasing the differences, since it's these tensions and contrasts that make us worth getting to know.

B. Self Commentary

See the Guidelines for Writing the Self Commentary.