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A World riting 2025-12-01 10:05:19

Electronic Literature Project Introduction

Educators Must Respect Families’ Languages and Cultures

Early childhood educators should honor families’ languages and cultures while consistently building loving relationships with children and their families. Additionally, teachers’ practices and curriculum should reflect the diverse cultures and languages of the children. This is part of my introduction to my children’s e-book that I will be creating with the software tools Kotobee Author or Book Creator. (Children’s version: Culture and languages are important for families. In class, teachers love discovering and sharing them. Children get to celebrate what makes them unique, and this way, school is warm like home.)

My electronic literature project aspiration is to create digital spaces for children to explore a variety of cultures and their own feelings of emotions. This e-book features simple, accessible content customized for young children, especially those aged 8 to 10. It includes stories about various emotions children often experience, presented on bright, colorful pages to engage young readers. The goal is to promote confidence, compassion, and a sense of belonging. Supporting children’s emotional, social, and cultural development. This fun, short story e-book helps children understand their feelings, appreciate diverse cultures, and build a positive self-image.

By: Lareice Weeks-Bigelow

student blogs

A World riting 2025-12-01 10:05:19

Electronic Literature Project Introduction

Educators Must Respect Families’ Languages and Cultures

Early childhood educators should honor families’ languages and cultures while consistently building loving relationships with children and their families. Additionally, teachers’ practices and curriculum should reflect the diverse cultures and languages of the children. This is part of my introduction to my children’s e-book that I will be creating with the software tools Kotobee Author or Book Creator. (Children’s version: Culture and languages are important for families. In class, teachers love discovering and sharing them. Children get to celebrate what makes them unique, and this way, school is warm like home.)

My electronic literature project aspiration is to create digital spaces for children to explore a variety of cultures and their own feelings of emotions. This e-book features simple, accessible content customized for young children, especially those aged 8 to 10. It includes stories about various emotions children often experience, presented on bright, colorful pages to engage young readers. The goal is to promote confidence, compassion, and a sense of belonging. Supporting children’s emotional, social, and cultural development. This fun, short story e-book helps children understand their feelings, appreciate diverse cultures, and build a positive self-image.

By: Lareice Weeks-Bigelow

student blogs

Almost Done!

Hey Everyone!

We are winding down to the end! I am happy that things are finally winding down, but I will miss class as well!

My final project is going really well. Last class was really inspiring for helping me hone in on my project. I have finished the visual part of the project and have been working on my outline. I have a basic idea of what my narrative is and the events that I will include in the project. My project will be based in poetry and it won’t be a straight forward narrative like my thesis. Instead, my project will be a series of events that are connected, yet the moments don’t spell out a concrete story.

The moments in my project will be memories of a deceased person and I think it serves the themes of the project better if the story is more abstract like All of Your Time Tossed Selves. I have decided to include an intro page that serves as a frame work for the story. I will let the reader know that the protagonist has killed themselves and that it is up to them to unravel the memories of what was. I think this will be a gentle entry for the reader into the work instead of no intro and letting the reader figure things out on their own.

I am finishing up my outline. Once the outline is done, I just need to create the poems for the piece. Some poems will be written by me and others will be blackout poems of songs. They will be “emo” songs from the mid 2000’s. These are the songs that many millennials, including me, have grown up on. The genre is called emo because these songs are highly emotional. Many emo bands sing about depression, anxiety, and heartbreak. The song that served as a large inspiration for this piece is called “Die Romantic” by the band Aiden. Link here: https://youtu.be/YbygUxEjnos?si=A8oqqqkXBTso4Mom

The song is very dark as it is about suicide and how there is romance in dying. The video shows the singer of the band following around different people who are thinking about self harming or committing suicide. Rather than tell then to keep going, his character is the finally whisper that causes the people in the video to commit the act. It almost subverts your expectations because a happy ending is more acceptable to society. But I think that’s the whole point of the video. It’s that there are people who think and feel dark things and the words they hear can be the final thing that push them over the edge. Rather than thinking in a negative light, it shows that we have the power to help people, but we also have the power to harm. And maybe if we look at someone who committed suicide, like the protagonist of my piece, we will see moments that seemed simple on the surface, but held deep seated trauma. And maybe we’ll start to see things in a different life and embody the phrase “Everyone is fighting a battle that you know nothing about.”

student blogs

Final Project Continuation

I hope you all had a great and restful Thanksgiving and long weekend!

This week I settled on a light-hearted story about a apartment of roommates and some missing dessert. Since class on Monday, I began drafting a bit of the story and nailing down which platform I’m going to use. I haven’t thought of Prezi in a very long time. In fact, I didn’t even know it still existed until Monday’s class. I think I will either land on Canva or Prezi. Right now I have my intro complete and one character profile. I am actually feeling excited about this project. I really enjoy creative writing so being able to tap into that side is very fun for me.

I really think creating work that feels light-hearted and fun is just as important as creative pieces with profound themes and meanings. The world always seems to feel heavy lately and I think creating pieces that just mainly entertain people is equally important. I also am leaning on the side of simplicity when it comes to design. This semester I found myself always a little lost when navigating some of the pieces so by design I want it to feel like an easy experience for my readers. Ultimately I am very excited for the design aspect (although I am not an artist or really all that tech savvy).

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Working with Twine

I’ve been really excited for this project because I had an idea that I have wanted to focus on for awhile. While I necessary do not have an outline, the website that I am using is an outline in itself. I was able to write out whatever I was thinking and Twine also gives the option to “Press play” so I can see how my project will look when everything comes together. Personally, whatever I do have so far is pretty cool for me but I think I can definitely play around a lot and perfect the piece. Twine is super easy to use so I am not afraid of losing any of my work. Honestly, since I kind of figured out how to use Twine, my project should probably be done by end of this week. I provided what I have so far in terms of the interactive story that I am working on.

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Final Project Workshop 1 Reflection

As you read my lines of poetry in a Microsoft Word Doc the lines will be part of the Warped Image Text that engulfs the lines which are based on a variety of emotions, and life  dealing with Repressed Hurt, Anger, Love, Guidance, Overcoming, Strength, Determination, Resilience, Companionship and others that we all face or have to deal with at some point in our lives. I have attached and included  suitable videos that represent such feelings but in a creative way. Each song and performance allows me to find healing through the action of watching and writing before and finding a music video as these emotions are played out on the screen not by myself but musicians lyrics, video. I feel no longer alone in dealing with such emotions and have an outlet through the music video interaction , questioning, hearing, and reminiscing being able to filter these emotions in words and now in thought when my audience can actively click on embedded YouTube video hyperlink and be able to deal with a emotion or situation that they haven’t come to terms with or accepted, being and beginning the act of Healing and comfort through a combination of streaming, hypertext link technology when human interaction isn’t present to support them. This creates a active playlist and also word scape that coincides or reflects similar to the lyrics and my poetry.

I am kinda still contemplating how I will find the best way to create an interactive elit with the technologies I am aware of. I have many ideas, but execution will be the issue in choosing some of the suggestions I received in class during the workshop from Cindy using Twine, Wix or even my own ideas with Adobe After Effects, Microsoft Word and creating a Word Cloud. I feel it will require a combination or a commitment ot one program to make my elit functional for my reader. There still are decisive decisions to be made with creating a project that I am happy with and also serves its purpose as Electronic Literature similar to some of the examples I have interacted with in this class and in the 4 Elit Vol. collections we chose from. I would like my project to be a reflection of myself, some kind of blending between poetry, non-fiction/fiction incorporating music, video, sound as a sense of feelings and emotion. Workshop 2 will help I feel get more entuned with what I can do.

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E-lit Final Project: When Love Becomes a Click

I want my e-lit project to explore what happens to love when it exists mostly through screens. Not just the social media version, but the kind filled with missed calls, delayed responses, and the quiet anxiety of time zones that never quite line up. My idea centers around building an interactive fiction about a long-distance couple trying to survive the distance while still learning how to love each other in a digital world.

At the beginning of the experience, the reader would choose the characters’ love languages: words of affirmation, acts of service, quality time, physical touch, or gift-giving. These choices don’t just act as personality traits, they shape how the story unfolds. A character who values quality time might struggle more with distance than one who values words of affirmation. The story would unfold through text messages, voice memos, short poems, and shared music links. The reader wouldn’t just read the relationship; they’d participate in maintaining it.

Each chapter would present the reader with choices: Do you send a poem or a playlist? Do you wait to respond or call immediately? Do you confront immigration issues directly, or avoid them out of fear? These decisions lead the couple down different paths. Some endings might show diaspora love surviving systems designed to break it. Others might show how distance, lack of intimacy, or family pressure slowly tears them apart.

Visually and structurally, I imagine the project looking like a chat interface or message thread, where timestamps, loading dots, and unsent messages become part of the narrative something like “Hana Feels” or “Writers are not Strangers.” There would be moments of silence built into the story, blank spaces where users have to sit with the absence, simulating what long-distance actually feels like. Music and poetry would function as emotional artifacts, love letters in digital form, showing how intimacy adapts when touch isn’t possible.

This project matters to me as a person that had had to navigate a failed long-distance love, it isn’t just about romance. It’s also about borders, migration, cultural expectation, and emotional survival. By making it interactive, I want readers to feel the weight of choice,  to understand that love online is not passive consumption, but active, fragile construction. Every decision becomes political. Every message becomes evidence of care or neglect. In the end, some relationships will survive. Others won’t. But either way, the reader walks away understanding that love, like electronic literature, is shaped by systems, interfaces, and the emotional code we choose to write within them.

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Final Project Early Ideas

I’ve been deadset on doing a visual novel and finally found a software that makes that goal easy without the frustration of learning code. The reader will be able to click through the story and make choices. Here’s the first page:

I wanted to do a little horror story about an unethical workplace. It’ll be a satire of how Human Resources do nothing to actually protect employees and how large companies profit off of exploitation. I’m stunted when it comes to ideas right now, but I know I’ll be taking a lot of inspiration from analog horror videos.

-SS

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The Plot Of My Project

Unfortunately, I had a packed weekend, which resulted in me getting sick. I opened the coffee shop two days in a row and went to a concert in between those two shifts, which resulted in not a lot of sleep and a lot of exposure to people.

Luckily, my project for class is already well under-way. I had the idea of creating a Minecraft Poetry Nature Walk, in which as you walk through different biomes you read Haikus about them.

I’ve already begun writing some of the poems and picking a seed (a randomly generated world that fits the aesthetic purposes of my project.) All I have left to do is design my pathway and surrounding architecture, should I choose to include it.

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Thoughts on the Final E-lit project

While I do not have a full idea of how I am going to pull off this project, I do have some initial thoughts as to what type of story I want to tell. For this project I want to make a story that plays with the relationship between reader and writer.  More specifically, I want to play with the idea of “ownership” of a story’s meaning between the reader and the writer. The project, “writers are not stranger” really inspired me to think about this project. Although I may have not loved its execution, I did like the ideas it had. With this idea, I want to probably use hypertext. Since I do not have a lot of technical prowess with working with programs online, I feel like being simple would work more for me in the long run. Just spit balling, I can see my work being a collection of stories or vignettes that seem very deep or abstract but are really simple in nature. I want to readers disagree with the writers is trying to work with (If that makes sense). Again, I like the idea of the author playing with the reader through their work. Going with the idea of hypertext, I also want to think about using images and even music/ sound for this project. I would need to flesh out my idea a bit more to know for sure want I want to do with the inclusion of visual and audio media. I am not that creative, so I am concerned for this project, but I am excited about the challenge of it all.