Using Photoshop and Dreamweaver, take the content of an "old-media" text (a poem, song lyric, short story, analogue film) and create a series of hypertext screens that realize the original's effects and meaning by "visualizing" its verbal elements and making a hypertext version of its sequential, analogue experience.

As an example, take a look at this interpretation/remediation of the film Seven done by Erik Yanda, a student in a previous class.

Be sure not to be too faithful to the original's pacing and structure of the original. Instead, find a structure and progression that follows your project's own internal logic.

Since writing for the screen is condensed and chunked compared to print, select words you use from the original. Like a piece of literary criticism, this creative assignment asks you to "reconstruct a work in the image of its meaning."

The original text that you choose to work with can be either your own work or someone else's, but it should be an aesthetic or "literary" text, rather than something analytical or journalistic.

An alternative possibility: take a non-aesthetic text and make it aesthetic—for example, a news report of the Columbia disaster and make it a kind of verbal/visual poem in the tradition of "found poetry."

Criteria

Conception, Unity and Contrast

• project completely “remediates” the original work into a new visual/verbal medium, recreating the original “in an image of its meaning” rather than following its structure and genre (worth x4)
• choices of font, color, background, layout, etc. unifies the look and feel of the various pages
• page size and design creates unity
• contrasts on the page used to suggest meaning and effect, create a sense of richness (while avoiding conflicts and complication in design), and suggests relationships of parts,
• highlights key ideas and rhetorical effects
  white (negative) space used effectively to create sense of proximity, to highlight focal elements, to emphasize the visual rhythm of the screen. Avoids trapped or accidental white space used for not particular effect.
• contrasts from screen to screen suggest meaningful narratives, changes, sequences.

Visualization of Purpose

• placement and use of space
• images and “visualized” text creates a consistent, hybrid voice of visual/verbal effects
• images and text brought together to suggest meaning and effects through irony or to open up the possibility of interpretation
• development of original materials
• degree of texture, visual interest

Hypertext, Navigation and Interactivity

• sequencing, dispersion, navigation suggest meaning and achieve effects
• linearity vs. interactivity chosen for effect
• navigation mechanism useful and suggestive
• use of first or main page to establish meaning or effect, orient reader

Functionality and Process

• readability of text
• function and availability of hypertext
• image preparation
• general functionality good, no unintended distractions from the content
• annotations thoughtful and complete (worth x3)