Skip to main content

Choosing Software for Digital Fiction: Step 2

Features

But what kind of website? I could build a simple flash site that takes my readers through my stories click by click, the way Inanimate Alice does. It's a pretty simple option, really, and wouldn't require a ton of web-savvy to build.

I could build a hyperlinked text, like an online version of Afternoon and Patchwork Girl, simply creating links from page to page to represent my story spaces. It would be really easy to put together with the web tools I already have, like iWeb, Google Sites, or any basic WYSIWYG editor.

I'm an ambitious soul, however. Hypertexts have been done. Flash has been done. Games have been done, and fan fic has been done. Not many that I've found has combined them all together into one, however. I want that capability, and nothing I'd seen was approaching this level of functionality.

So I made a list of the features I want to be able to include in my digital text:
  • Text
  • Hypertext (i.e. networked structure)
  • Images
  • Sound
  • Collaboration: readers can contribute text, images, their own stories, etc.
  • Community: forums, blogs, a sense of belonging to the storyworld
  • Print or Save capability: so readers can print a PDF of the story they participate in, for sharing or revisiting
  • Mobile capabilities: readers can access the story on their mobile devices
  • Membership/password protection: should the story catch on, should I ever sign on with a publisher who wants to publish the book and subsequently sell the digital story, it's nice to have restrictions on access - signing up could require a passcode received once you've paid a fee, subscription, or provided proof you've purchased the print novel. Something like that anyway.
  • Activity tracking: another aspect of requiring membership (even free membership) is that I can track what's going on on the site - who makes what changes, what's popular, what's not working, etc. Great for providing feedback to the author, and for using in my research.
  • Networking my work: the idea behind practice-based research is that the work doesn't necessarily stand completely on its own. Like a DVD packed with extras, it's great to be able to go behind the scenes, to see how the author created the piece, the thought processes, the research, the other work they did along the way. I want to be able to link back to my main website, my blog, my other work, etc.
There's probably more to this list than I can think of at the moment or track down in my notes, but this is the gist.

The scary thing I faced was that I'm not a web developer. I have basic html skills, enough to post images in my chat forums and add some code here and there to my WYSIWYG website builder. Make me edit a CSS, and my eyes cross - I know what it is, and I appreciate its purpose, but I'm just not at that editing level yet, much less creation level. I couldn't even begin to start on the ground zero process of greating a large, membership based site with all the functionality I wanted. I was daunted.

Until a few weeks ago, when I attended the second session of CEDAR, that I started to generate a good idea...
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Did Somebody Offer a Challenge?

Bruce Sterling over at Wired.com posted eighteen of them for Contemporary Literature. It's a skeletal overview: a list of statements without background or exploration of any. I'd like to offer a few brief thoughts on the list, just for my own brainstorming sake. Who knows; there may be eighteen papers in here somewhere. 1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot. "Contemporary society" is a pretty big blanket, there, Bruce. I think you might mean "contemporary digitally literate culture" - after all, it's only in the Westernized world that we are beginning to share our language and culture through global media such as Facebook and mobile phones. This also assumes a very strict definition of literature: that which is published in print form, presumably a book. 2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed tex...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Take on Specifications Grading (or, How I Learned to Not Spend My Weekends Marking)

I’ve been proselytizing this method for a while now, and have used it in a range of creative writing and publishing modules. It’s been wildly successful for me (though of course I’ll continue tweaking it), and enough people have asked about it that I thought I’d put it together into an overview/summary resource. It should probably be an actual paper one of these days, but that would require time and research and motivation. Natch. My teaching model is based on Linda Nilson’s Specifications Grading  (she’s also got a great intro article on Inside Higher Ed ), just so the original genius can get plenty of credit. My motivations are these: I came a hair’s breadth from burning out entirely. I went from teaching creative writing classes with 7-10 students on them to massive creative writing modules with 80+ students on them. Marking loads were insane, despite the fact that I have a pretty streamlined process with rubrics and QuickMarks and commonly used comments that I can cut and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

In which the Apathy Monster is curtailed

Me, lately I spent my PhD years going to many, many  conferences. When you're in a small department in an isolated part of the world, they're kind of a necessity. You go to meet anyone - anyone  - who is doing similar stuff, and who won't stare at you blankly when you describe your research. You go to try out your ideas, to make sure the academic community you'll be pitching them to don't think you're an absolute waste of space ( imposter syndrome is for real). Also, you go just to go somewhere (though I think I went to Leicester far too often). In the last few years, as I've gained contacts and confidence, I've gone to fewer and fewer conferences. I know the ones that best suit me now, and where I'll get to meet and/or catch up with my peeps. I also know the ones, of course, where I've never made any headway at all. I was pleasantly surprised this week to be wrong about that last one. MIX Digital - Bath Spa University Let me back thi...
Post a Comment
Read more