Spinning Narrative Webs

Stories start, go somewhere interesting (in the best case), and end. They are linear, in other words. Our entire narrative framework presumes that linearity, even when (as in flashbacks and multiple plot lines) we try to work against the long line of the story.

The Internet, however, works on a different model – instead of the line, we have a web of hyperlinked pages spreading out in all virtual directions. Readers/viewers/listeners are free to move across the nodes of Web pages as they want, in whatever order seems to make the most sense.

For this project, you will combine everything you have learned this semester about networked communication (the blogging project), multi-media rhetorics (the visual/verbal project), and the effective presentation of information and experiences (the PowerPoint project), to compose a narrative web. The narrative may be entirely your own invention, or taken from an already-existing narrative, but the material in the web must be composed by you. (In other words, it’s not enough to copy several web pages into your web. You need to do the bulk of the composing, and what doesn’t spring forth from your fertile mind must be identified by proper citation.)

This is the capstone project for Digital Composing, which means that we will discuss it throughout the semester. By the end of the semester, this project will make a great deal more sense.

The Subversive PowerPoint project consists of four elements: a proposal, in which you explain your topic and a broad schematic of your web that explains the rhetorical and artistic moves you plan to make; a draft version of your narrative web (5% of your final grade); an analysis of your project, examining what worked, what didn’t, what you would do to improve it, and why you think that would (5% of your final grade); and a revised form of your project (10% of your final grade).