Joshua Brown’s forum discussion From the Illustrated Newspaper to Cyberspace: Visual Technologies & Interaction in the Nineteenth & Twenty-First Centuries touches on the immensely interesting topic of how to effectively synthesize narrative, navigation and content in digital projects (whether those be CD-ROMs or websites). During the formation of the Lost Museum website, Brown outlines the construction process along with important discoveries found during user testing. Brown summarizes a major problem programmers faced during the construction phase on page 271 when he asks, “How could we maintain a visual narrative and yet also allow users to intervene in that narrative, to create their own pedagogical pathways and intellectual connections?”

More than likely a single answer to the question Brown poses doesn’t exist. As we have learned this semester while building our own websites, content drives the design to a much larger extent than the other way around. I have been brainstorming this weekend about my site and how to incorporate video game technologies and flash animations into my own website focusing on W.L. Abbott. Currently I simply don’t have the technical capability to actually create this proposed site, so this idea is still in the theoretical stages. But I wanted to ask your opinions on whether or not this idea is even worth pursuing. What aspects of this idea seem plausible and educationally beneficial? What aspects seem unrealistic and forced? Where do I seem to be “trying to hard” in the sense that I am making the site cuter than it needs to be when really a more traditional approach would get the information across just as well?

Just to remind everyone, my websites main function is a digital space where the Smithsonian’ National Museum of Natural History can publish the hundreds of letters written by William Louis Abbott during the late 19th & early 20th centuries. I believe the Abbott letters lend themselves perfectly to a video game format, as the narrative has already been constructed for me. Scholars at Natural History have already assorted Abbott’s letters into a relatively smooth narrative that proceeds in a mostly chronological fashion. Thus I could conceivably create a “video game” that would actually function more like a documentary chronicling Abbott’s adventures. Rather than create a potentially corny, low-budget video using an Arizona landscape to represent the East African deserts (which in turn may alienate younger users), Abbott’s world will be completely digitally constructed. Following the narrative Abbott himself wrote the user could journey through late 19th Century East Africa (from a Western affluent male perspective of course).

Seems straightforward enough so far right? But how should I deal with the high probability that Abbott exaggerated or outright lied about certain events in his letters. As historians, corroborating stories and searching for the most likely narrative of any particular event is a basic duty we perform during research. One of the reasons these letters have taken so long to finally be published is the immense research that went into finding alternate versions of the events and socio-political context Abbott describes. If we publish Abbott’s letters in the traditional analog text-based format, we would simply add a footnote explaining the existence of other possible interpretations of an event to incorporate alternate interpretations. Online publications, and specifically three-dimensional virtual worlds, give us many more exciting methods for presenting these dissenting opinions.

Stealing my inspiration from a weekend viewing of Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1950 film Rashomon, I have decided that these alternate interpretations can easily be incorporated into the general narrative (movie). There are many ways I could display a notice that will alert the viewer/user that a possible alternative interpretation exists for the events currently being described. The user will then have the option of viewing that alternate narrative, or simply continuing along with Abbott’s interpretation. One example that comes to mind is the writings of Thomas Stevens. Stevens traveled with Abbott for about 3 months in 1889. He eventually published a book chronicling his travels entitled Scouting for Stanley in East Africa. Stevens’ book gives the historian numerous accounts that differ from Abbott’s, that would work well in my website. I will also need to alert the user whom the audiences are for Stevens and Abbott. While Stevens was writing to the American public, Abbott was almost exclusively writing to his mother and sister. Thus we can reasonably assume that the different audiences influenced what information was included, altered or left out in each account.

I envision this video narrative as being a supplemental section to the actual letters which will entail the essential portion of the website. Hopefully I could provide links in the movie to the specific letter that we are referencing at any given moment in time. This process may simply be the display of the date of the letter currently being narrated somewhere on a time scroll. But I would also break up the movie into sections so that I could place a link on the letter’s pages corresponding with the date as well. Thus a user would have the ability to progress through the website in a chronological or sporadic fashion, hopefully accommodating different learning styles and research purposes when entering the site. While I like this idea, I feel there must be some way to make it more interactive. What I am basically talking about so far is an online movie with limited user-website interaction. I will need to think I lot more about this before I completely commit to it.