Project 1: Annotation of a Text

On a Web page, create an electronic version of a single, linear text that would benefit from linked annotations to supplemental words, images, maps, etc. on other Web pages

Criteria

Focus and Purpose

  • Choose a print text that needs annotation, either to be understood fully or to be read in the way you want an audience to understand it (satirically, analytically, historically, etc.).
  • Create useful annotations that fully accomplish your purpose above
  • Use the annotations to realize cumulatively a coherent purpose and focus
  • Produce text/hypertext hybrid: that is, a central page (an electronic simulation of a traditional text) with hypertext links to pages or windows that supplement and comment upon words and passages of that page

Technical Issues

  • Produce a fully functioning project using Photoshop and Dreamweaver
  • Successfully create and maintain links that work
  • Prepared and optimize images for the Web which function online

Visualization and Writing

  • Design this electronic text/hypertext so readers don't "lose" the main page (mistaking this annotated text for a conventional Web site) or unexpectedly find themselves off site altogether
  • Provide visual keys on the main page to indicate where annotations are available without interfering excessively with the integrity and readabiity of the original. You might consider altenatives to the blue, underlined link format
  • Create pages that are visually engaging and unified by visual motifs (a consistent color scheme, a repeated vocubulary of images, a coherent style of visual presentation, etc.)

Process

  • post the URL to the appropriate Webx discussion
  • provide a URL functioning and correct
  • annotate a printout with numbers keyed to numbered comments typed on a separate sheet
  • thoughtfulness and scope of comments

Samples

Here are some sample, Web-based texts with hypertext annotations. Some of them are pretty rough! How well do you think each of them realizes the goals above? How do the design and content of these annotated texts suggest varied purposes and uses?