I just wanted to start by apologizing to everyone for my absence from class today; I woke up in the middle of the night extremely sick and was not able to get to class. However, I did not want my piece of electronic literature to go without any explanation so I have decided to blog about what I was going to say. I hope you all enjoy it!

Originally what I wanted to do was start off with dice and the reader had to click it in order to “roll it” and one of six different choices would come up. We are all born into a specific life, we cannot choose our families that we get, so just like that, the reader was not able to choose their family. My six options would have been things like a person from a high-income family, someone from a different race, someone who was born from a low-income family, etc. Once receiving your “life” then you proceed to different scenarios that most people face in their lives from childhood all the way to adulthood. Some options you are able to choose and others you must roll the dice again to see your outcome because sometimes in life we do not have a choice and things just happen. I was going to have a pathway on a road to make the choices and a continuing theme of the dice to roll and see what happens. No gender is ever revealed. By the end, the reader would have came to a conclusion depending on what they have rolled and what they chose to do with their options. Those endings were things like death, higher education, homelessness, starting a family, etc. I had to make a lot of changes because I was not able to create such a challenging piece. Instead I made a hypertext linking piece by piece to click and move on, but I did keep the concept of some being choices and some just happening. In the end of the piece you can choose your ending, but if not satisfied you may go back and choose again. The reason I did this was because in real life you cannot choose what happens to you, but in the world of Elit I wanted to allow choices. I also changed the concept of the dice into doors because of my lack of knowledge on how to make dice. The original name was “Roll away, Scroll away,” but it was changed to “Settlement” because that is what I had to do with my piece and what ultimately happens to people in life. They must settle with their choices and with things that just occur and are out of their control.

I was able to create this entire piece using power point and the part that took me the longest to do was linking all of the hypertext to flow smoothly, it is very interactive because you must click to move on, but you must click slowly and wait for each and every part to appear. There are some sounds, for example when you click the door, but I did not add music because I did not want to distract the reader from what was really important, the main idea. The entire piece ended up becoming a huge contradiction at the end because you are able to make a choice and reverse that choice after the entire idea was suppose to be realistic and that is where the “Settlement” derived from. I used images from different sites and even a clip in which if you allow it to play through is a quick video to get a point across and allow my piece to be multimodal and give it a little more excitement.

I am not text savvy at all and was not able to make my piece the way I wanted at all, but I messed around with it for a while and tried to created it to the best of my abilities. I made it nice and short because I know how I felt when exploring one of the longer pieces and after a while my attention would be lost so I wanted to get the point across and straight to the ending which was most important.

Once again I apologize for my absence, I had a great time in class with all of you exploring this entirely new idea to me of electronic literature, thank you for taking the time to read through this blog!

 http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/carpenter__the_cape/sound_carries_stairs.html

J. R. Carpenter’s The Cape, is an interesting form of a hypertext poem using both words and images combined. It is about a woman who seems to be young, visiting her grandmother and uncle in Cape Cod. Although it is believed that the images, maps, data, video, etc. all seem to be factual, we know this not to be true because Carpenter explains it in her description about Cape Cod being a real place, but the pictures and characters are not real or not real in their size. It discusses its history with old black and white photos.

When entering this piece I was tempted to click on an “out-of-order” image when given multiple options, but because of the type of reader I am in which I like things to go from start to finish, I decided on clicking the first image on the top left which was the window of a house. The first few lines describe the woman’s location of where she was or was going and who she would be seeing out in Cape Cod. All of this came along side a compass and an image of what is believed to be her Grandmother’s house because she discusses her grandma living in “Cape Cod with a Cape Cod house” and her uncle living in the same place, but not in that “type” of house so ultimately I saw this house as the “Cape Cod” house. A portion of a map is also provided in order to help the reader get a better understanding of its location.

The next image was interesting because once I scrolled over the larger image, a piece in the middle began floating away slowly. Under that, the image starts moving very slowly as it reveals itself. Fortunately, I was able to find a way to see the image as a whole because I was not seeing the whole picture. By clicking the image and dragging it a little, the entire image pops out in full and we can see it is a person standing on the beach dressed as if it were freezing outside. This goes along with the text describing how in the winter they would walk on the beach.

The next image over is revealing a map and discussing how because this was from so long ago, everything is in black and white. All images still remain black and white as I scroll through. The slow revealing of the images given in some of the sections seem to be slow because back in history everything was slower. Now people are always moving so quickly and not taking the time to really see things anymore. These slow, old images come out little by little allowing the reader to take their time with it.

The last image is interesting because I expect another part of the story, but instead the reader chooses to explain the story and why they did the things they did. For example, it is explained that navigating the piece is fine in anyway chosen, but the narrator does from left to right. There is also a comment box for the reader which I have not come across in any other Elit piece. Overall, I was not a fan of this piece. It was slow and a little boring to me because the black and white images revealed so slowly. I like fast- paced pieces with sounds to help capture my attention.