To be honest, I don’t have a concrete concept. In looking at the examples, I think it would be interesting to work with Twine, so my only inclination (at this point) is to exploit the form of Twine itself and play with themes of audience agency, or agency as a whole. I think it might be interesting to explore interactivity with a text that hinges on agency or control. Immediately, I thought of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, but neither text is set to enter public domain until the 2040s. Regardless, this is an idea in its infancy. I plan to explore the features of Twine and see if there’s any aspects of the form that demand acknowledgement in the project, or that bring up any interesting concepts or challenges.

I’m also considering different formats such as Inform and Bitsy, but that may be best for more freeform, spatially-oriented interactivity (i.e. walking around a map vs. the choose-your-own-adventure format of Twine). The implications of this kind of play bring to mind the video game Undertale. For the uninitiated, Undertale is an 8-bit game released in 2015, where the narrative relies not just on your immersion in the game, but your understanding that you are not just a character on the screen. Certain characters intentionally break the 4th wall and talk to you, the player. They even interact with metadata of the game by affecting save files, and preventing the player from using buttons built into the game screen. The overall effect is the understanding that you as the player have choices outside the mechanics of the game. You don’t have to follow the form of the video game RPG and cut a bloody path through the game to gain levels and beat the boss. You can choose to be merciful, and in doing so, you break the pattern of the game itself and save everyone, even the villains.

I think this is an interesting mechanism. Especially in dour social commentary, the ability to move within the story without the same shackles as its characters is a powerful narrative device. In writing this, themes of helplessness or oppressive structures, etc. might also be interesting to explore. Regardless of how hopeless the narrative may be, speculative and cautionary fiction rely on the idea that the audience should learn from the story. In giving the audience freedom to move within the story, we can produce not a lesson learned, but a sense of freedom to enact that lesson. Alternatively, one could use the same agency to drive home any feeling of hopelessness. By structuring the playable product in a way that allows the player agency but no power to change the narrative, one could create a deeper empathy in the player for the characters that are “trapped” in the narrative. For now, I’m not sure which direction to go, or which text to explore. Any suggestions would be fantastic.

Concrete poetry is a literary movement from the 1950’s which uses arrangements of letters and linguistic elements to enhance the meaning of a poem. Since it relies so heavily on design and typography, it can also be considered an art movement born from the anti-impressionistic, non-representational concrete art of the 1930’s which attempted to create universal art. Being an intermedium between text, typography and sound, concrete poetry is a ripe area to explore using digital technologies. Using the works of prominent concrete poet Eugen Gomringer, my final project will re-imagine his poems in a digital landscape in an attempt to detach the text from its paper roots (or, keep it in dialogue with its counterpoint) and provide new readings based on interactions. Using various coding practices including html, css, and javascript, a selection of Gomringer’s poems from The Book of Hours and Constellations (Something Else Press, 1968) will be re-presented digitally and experimentally while maintaining the minimal aesthetics of the original form. Interactions and sound will offer another layer of interpretation and turn the reader into a performer and player of the text. The experimental nature of this project may yield messy, unexpected results but I am open to the possibilities that could arise.

In the example above, one of Gomringer’s most well-known poems, the word “silence” is repeated 14 times and alludes to the 14 lines of a sonnet. Traditional linear structure and punctuation has been abandoned. The resulting frame forms an empty space which can be interpreted as silence itself. In this way, the meaning is created by both the presence of the word and its visual form. In digital form, the space might be enlarged on a mouse-hover, the words might fade or become larger or smaller, a sound representing silence might be heard, or three-dimensional space might be used as opposed to two-dimensional. Other possibilities might include collaged text and onomatopoeia techniques seen in Dadaist and Futurist poems that only appear as the result of a reader’s actions. These are characteristics that cannot be experienced on a paper page and offer opportunities to create expanded interpretations – in this case, what is and isn’t “silence”, what does it look like, sound like or feel like?

In a theoretical framework, this project also explores paratext in digital media. Can code, interfaces, screens, keyboards be considered paratext and how do they differ from the original idea of paratexts in relation to the codex? Gerard Genette, in addition to defining the term “paratext”, also described it as a “threshold”, “an undecided zone”, “the fringe”. This project takes into account those terms as a central principle of how to present these poems, how to design their interface, and how to encourage the reader to interact with its content.

As sources of inspiration, I cite the lo-fi First Screening, a series of kinetic poems developed by “bpNichol” in 1984 on an early Apple computer. The original code is no longer available but others have since re-created the project in more current coding languages. Although there are many contemporary examples of kinetic text and experimental writing on the internet using coding, this is one of the earliest examples I could find which speaks to the project’s ability to counter the obsolescence of many digital endeavors. As a more contemporary example, Eugen Gomringer’s own website is uniquely developed to showcase his poetry, writing and other musings using digital media. The user must type in a word to start and is then presented with a series of texts, videos, and photos related to Gomringer and his work. It’s like a collaged film/narrative where the user will never encounter the same sequence twice. I’m particularly interested in this aspect of the reader as a performer with the ability to create something that can never be repeated again in the same way.

“The constellation is a system, it is also a playground with definite boundaries. The poet sets it all up. He designs the play-ground as a field-of-force & suggests the possible workings. The reader, the new reader, accepts it in the spirit of play, then plays with it.
With each constellation something new comes into the world. Each constellation is a reality in itself & not a poem about some other thing.” –Gomringer, 1968

This quote by Gromringer, written in the preface to the book I intend to use as the source material aptly describes the project I hope to accomplish. Gromringer’s ideas of “reading” and “playing” directly relate to the readings from this class.

—

Birke, D., & Christ, B. (2013). Paratext and Digitized Narrative: Mapping the Field. Narrative 21(1), 65-87. doi:10.1353/nar.2013.0003.

Drucker, J. Multiple sources …

Genette, G., & Maclean, M. (1991). Introduction to the Paratext. New Literary History, 22(2), 261–272. https://doi.org/10.2307/469037

Gomringer, Eugen, et al. (2021). Words Form Language: On Concrete Poetry, Typography, and the Work of Eugen Gomringer. Triest Verlag für Architektur, Design Und Typografie.

Gomringer, Eugen, and Max Bill. (1960). 33 Konstellationen. Tschudy.

Owens, Trevor. (2012). Glitching Files for Understanding: Avoiding Screen Essentialism in Three Easy Steps. The Signal. http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2012/11/glitching-files-for-understanding-avoiding-screen-essentialism-in-three-easy-steps/.

Rothenburg, Jerone. (1968). The Book of Hours and Constellations: Poems of Eugen Gomringer. Something Else Press, Inc.

My research focuses on woman writers/poets in Japan and I examine the multifaceted life stories presented by them in their works. In the meantime, my work in DH 720: Doing things with Novels inspired me to think further about the smoothness of our reading experience and the materiality of digital remediations.

For the final project, I choose to work on a short story collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), written by a Chinese-British-Canadian-American writer Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton, 1865–1914). The text is in the public domain, giving me flexibility in reproducing it in new forms. My research questions are: 1) how to present parallels between North American and Chinese culture, voices of immigrant women, and family memories in the diaspora on a digital platform; 2) how my choice of materials (the materiality of digital culture) speaks to the textuality of the story. I have asked a question once in my response to Graham’s and Drucker’s articles: can we say that a hypertext work remediated via digitalization transforms the implicity of intertextuality? I aim to provide some answers to the question through this project by creating annotations (Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Asian Americans in the early 20th century, and Chinese Culture in the diaspora) and making a new hypertext-beyond-narrative path that leads readers to explore themes of exclusion/inclusion, mixed-race heritage, and immigrant identities.

The whole project will be built on a WordPress site where I can provide the complete text, enable plugins, and embed images/maps/recordings. I am still building up my specific aims for the final project but currently I have designed the following sections.

1. I plan to choose passages from these short stories and generate AI-art images (I have tried Midjourney and believe it is the best, but I will give more AI tools a try) based on my chosen plot keywords. The results of the above step will inform an extended scope of the project at which I write an analysis of my AI adaptations based on the materiality/textuality presented by the AI tools, followed by a tutorial I write for readers who are interested in using AI-generated art to make visual/video adaptations of literary works. How is this kind of adaptation different from film/TV/theater adaptations? What are the roles of human creator and AI creator? Are these tools working well in different language settings or drawing a foreign cultural object?
2. If we ask our readers to become one character in these short stories, what kind of choices will this reader make for the fictional figure? I intend to design a simple interactive story (or even a scene) using Twine to provide options. This idea was inspired by Dot’s Game, a single-player game where a young black woman travels through time to key moments in her family member’s lives and understand how individual choices were made by social inequalities. My question behind this mini decision-making game is if there were alternative ways of living for an immigrant woman in the early 20th century. In the Game page, I also plan to write an introduction discussing the possibilities/challenges in utilizing games in reading literary works following nonlinear paths.

Works that I found relevant to my final project are:

Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Ellestrom, Lars. “Adaptation within the Field of Media Transformations.” In Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions, edited by Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik, Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, 113–132. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Taylor & Francis Group, 2014.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G., Richard Ovenden, Gabriela Redwine, and Rachel Donahue. Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections. Washington D.C: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2010.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Taylor & Francis Group, 2001. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Transmedia Storytelling as Narrative Practice.” In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, edited by Thomas Leitch, 527–542. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Schober, Regina. “Adaptation as Connection – Transmediality Reconsidered.” In Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions, edited by Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik, Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, 89–112. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

I once worked with Dr. Mary Chapman and will also refer to her public humanities projects on Edith and Winnifred Eaton.

As We May Think by Vannevar Bush was a sumptuous article that I had to read twice.  For a person to have such a grasp of so many varying fields, their present state of development and to be able to foretell by several generations where each field is headed with specific designs was stunning to me.  His understanding of how, “Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great economy of effort” will revolutionize the various scientific fields is hyper foresight. I was taken by how prescient Bush was in the specifics of inventions that would occur in many areas.  He articulated so many specific examples that I had to remind myself of the date it was written.  Some examples that stuck out are: “The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut,” is the Go-Pro of today. “There have long been films with diazo dyes which form a picture without development, so that it is already there as soon as the camera has been operated,” foresaw the Polaroid by several decades. “Consider a future device for individual use, which is sort of a mechanized private file and library… (the) memex,” is the PC or smartphone. The list he included is much longer. For an individual to have such a grasp they must need to have a high vantage point only achievable after some focused and serious work.  I was struck by his knowledge, his grasp of the material at his disposal, and his easy going, articulate matter-of-fact manner with which he dispensed his nuggets of wisdom.

Reading the article a second time with its sheen somewhat faded due to exposure, I was a bit more critical.  Yes, he has some brilliant observations and predictions (ignoring the dated sexism.)  The first to come to mind is the catch-22 that is a bane of our present age: We are bogged down by specialization but need specialization for progress, he notes. How can we continue to specialize and yet contribute to the larger field of science when most everyone is telescopically focused and we publish much but don’t understand most. He states, “A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored and above all it must be consulted.”  And here’s the rub: nowhere in the piece does he mention how given the incredible achievement of the scientists during this period to have come together to work together and achieve a common goal (defeat an enemy) this focus, this comradery could be used for the benefit of humans.  We won the war; could we not have gone on to win the peace? Why progress for progress’ sake? Given the era he just emerged out of, why not think of humaneness?  Why not harness this incredible energy to solidify institutional, scientific codes or systems of humaneness- progress must serve specific human endeavor, e.g. eradicate hunger, build affordable homes, renewable cooking contraptions for nomadic peoples?  Reflecting of those ideas made the piece a bit different for me.  Yes, he was still prophetic, but, now, as a somewhat, detached scientist wanting to only progress for progress’s sake.  An element of hubris drifted in, something of a Victor Frankenstein element. Technology is not an altar to worship at but a toolbox only to be consulted conscientiously. This echo rang in my brain.

Deformance and Interpretation by Samuels an McGann reads like a treatise with all of the attendant aspects such a monograph involves, such as returning to it over and over, to gain insights, guides of action, ways of understanding, and novel techniques to use in the area.  This is definitely the case in this laden dissertation. The authors extend our ability to interact with an imaginative work. Instead of, “the usual object of interpretation (which is) ‘meaning,’” the authors postulate, “… alternative moves to break beyond conceptual analysis into kinds of knowledge involved in performative operations- a practice of everyday imaginative life.” They want the reader to gain new insight into a work by the act of poiesis rather than just dissection or criticism.  Because a creative work is open for performance, it’s also open to more. They give 4 possibilities for such an extension: reordered (reading backward), isolating, altering, or adding. They draw from history to show lineage of these ways of interrogating a text to help a reader open up more avenues than just plain meaning.  They refer to Blake who wanted this extension as well as Dickenson who wanted to discover what is possible from an imaginative piece to Dante for whom ‘meaning is a dynamic exchange than a discoverable content, and that the exchange is best revealed as a play of differences.” Several of the deformations made intuitive sense to me.  It is something I practice in a visual mode.  When looking at a photograph or a painting, I (when physically viable) turn it upside down.  This opens up new ways of looking at the piece.  New relationships, new compositional elements, new negative space elements show themselves. Following a footnote led me to a musical equivalent by John Cage in his Silences: Lectures and Writings where he deformes Satie and Varese.  This stimulated the grey cells a bit faster and I realized that this was the birth of what is now hip-hop.  The birth of hip-hop is rap where an individual practiced 2 of the methods mentioned- reordered and isolated the original creative piece to extract new meaning – poiesis! By ‘reading backward’ the LP or 12” and isolating certain sections, the ‘reader’ was able to create new meaning from the original piece. The process was exactly the same as that elucidated by Samuels and McGann. The original imaginative piece was used as a basis of poiesis rather than mere interpretation or analysis. Samuels and McGann offer a useful tool to add to my creative toolbox.

We’ll put our heads together and choose a text to “play,” beginning next week. There are no hard and fast rules on what makes for a good text, but in my view here are some general criteria:

• size matters: there’s a lot of work (well, play) in order to read the text and understand it, plus do enough research on your character in order to play them competently. So novella-length is good. Also, a modest number of main characters is much better than a Tolstoyan dramatis personae.
• rich history helps: the play really cooks when you can activate the penumbra around a text rather than just enact what happens within its pages. So texts that have interesting reception histories or performance histories or controversies around them are a good fit.
• lively voices: since you’re basically ventriloquizing characters, authors, readers, etc., one hopes for fun, lively characters to inhabit.

A few suggestions:

• At the risk of tedium, my earlier suggestion of Sinclair Lewis’s novel imagining a dystopian fascist USA, It Can’t Happen Here, would be great. I dimly remember that it was turned into a play that was widely performed in the 1930s and would be interesting to delve into.
• How about Jonathan Franzens’ The Corrections, given that it sparked the notorious Oprah Affair and occasioned all kinds of discussions about literature, media, and commerce?
• A novel with a coterie of famous readers around it might be cool, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?

I’m sure you’ll have your own ideas, and we can have 2 or 3 games going on different texts if we like.

Finally, a few examples:

• These 720ers played Nella Larsen’s 1920s Harlem Renaissance novel of passing, Quicksand.
• And these Hunter undergrads played a cycle of Charles Chesnutt’s revisionary plantation fiction stories, The Conjure Tales.
• Finally, these 720ers played Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

The Dracula of my youth

When we started this project, we had intended to do something more interesting standard annotations. What we ended up with was something on the more standard end of the annotation spectrum. I think there’s a reason for that, and it’s simply that traditional annotation works. I think there’s a beauty in that. Sure, it’s nice to see all of the history of memes surrounding Dracula all collated into this fancy interface, but when considering annotation we also have to consider the user, not just the future recipient of those annotations. We can bully those who highlight and underline a book to illegibility all we want, but maybe that worked for them, even if it makes the book difficult for you now.

So with that said, our annotations work/ed for me. I read Dracula at the back of the pack from the rest of my group, so when I was reading, I got all the notes they had already made. I didn’t need to Google obscure words as much, or wonder if there was a cultural connection there, or if someone already thought that sentence was racist (though, don’t get me wrong, I still had a LOT to contribute- there’s a lot in this text). I think our annotations helped me read the text, not just for guiding me through the odd archaic term, but also for sort of forcing me to read and actually understand what I was reading. I had a mission: make annotations about the cultural context of Dracula. That meant that I had to understand and convey information in an understandable way. Not just annotating, but purposeful annotating was an extremely helpful exercise.

I think the fact that I actually read and annotated about 70% of Dracula directly on our own blog really speaks to its usability, and I also came out of this with a love for Hypothesis as a tool. (The other 30% was on my Kindle copy of Dracula since I’m travelling—that said, those are still being transferred to Hypothesis when I have wifi).

As far as my approach to annotations in concerned, we had all divided the group up to different sorts of annotations “you gather the memes, you go get historical context, you get this that” and what have you, but we didn’t actually end up doing that at all. Once we got to the text, we found… wow, we all have so much to say about radically different things. And we just rocked with it! We decided that that was in the spirit of annotation and collaboration and should be exactly what we do! I made some historical notes. I also commented “that’s gay” a lot. I also added a few of my reactions to the text. I tried to keep stuff that was repetitive to a minimum, and I did have to go back into Hypothesis (read: still need to do even more) and cull some of my annotations so they’re actually useful (ie, not highlighting and underlining the whole page) to any future readers, but it’s also nice to see the reactions people have to a text. I even used GIFs and memes sometimes like Natalie and Faihaa!

You can read about annotation and the best styles and how to note take etc all you want, but until you actually try to do it with purpose I don’t think you can really understand why it has evolved the way it has and what’s a good annotation and what’s a bad one etc. I don’t think a lot of that theory ends up mattering as much if we all end up going back to the tried-and-true at the end of the day. And it’s tried-and-true because not only does it work for the recipient, but it also works for the user.

Mapping Mihály
Capturing the mental state of a traveller on a Journey by Moonlight

Antal Szerb’s novel, Journey by Moonlight, features the erratic, exciting, and somewhat tortured adventures of Mihály, a young Hungarian newlywed on his honeymoon in Italy. After abandoning his new wife for a hysteria-fueled adventure through the country that stirs up old memories of his youth. As he travels around the country meeting new characters and running into old friends (and frenemies) he grapples with that age-old conundrum: pursue the wild abandon of unknown possibilities and freedom or follow the carved out “respectable” path laid forth by custom. Through memories we are shown the events of his youth that inspired his curiosity for complete freedom, and through each person he comes in contact with we see him offered a new potential path forward. In the end, he is confronted with the exact figure of his youth who most dramatically inspired in him a susceptibility to questioning tradition and chasing reinvention and the unknown.

For my final project I would like to create a visual schematic of Mihály’s memories, his journey through Italy, and the characters he interacts with—branching out and connecting the influences that weigh on his mind at all times as he grapples with this major life decision. In this way, I can present as evidence the various elements that contribute to his behavior and the decision he makes at the close of the novel. Building on insights garnered through work in Miro for the second group project, I would like to bring Mihály’s mental pathways to life using the same platform. Using the project board, I would like to create a framework that indicates the interconnectivity of the past and the present, and the physical locations and individuals who impact Mihály. I do not intend to account for the entire novel—there, for example, a portion is devoted to the misadventures Erzsi, Mihály’s wife —but I will account for every character whose existence presses on Mihály’s mental state—creating the push and pull he struggles with throughout the novel. The final piece will resemble a narrative only up to a certain point—using hyperlinks within the text, a user will be able to jump between areas of Mihály’s world and potentially travel through Italy, but ultimately the goal is to account for Mihály’s experience. I think it’s important to be able to see the schematic fully—or at least portions of it at a time—as a way of representing the constant retreading down neural pathways and constant hum and glow of all of the emotional, intellectual, physical, and social data we process as we maneuver the world. Using a digital storytelling platform like Twine would help the user slowly build up some idea of Mihály’s situation and mental state, but by using Miro I can immediately present the pressure he feels and holds within him and start to mimic the sensation of navigating his anguish and indecision.

After users have explored Mihály’s world, I will invite them to select the path that is most attractive to them, before revealing Mihály’s own decision that closes out the novel.

Contos Maravilhosos is a WordPress website that reimagines how children can experience bedtime stories. The website presents a selection of eighteen bedtime tales written in Portuguese by Tereza de Castro Callado, a Brazilian writer, teacher, and philosopher. As a bedtime story is a traditional form of storytelling, where a story is told to children to prepare them for sleep, Contos Maravilhosos is presented in a multimedia format. Each text has an audio version, which is displayed on the website as an audiogram.

As Contos Maravilhosos follows a fantastic genre, a literary style characterized by fictional narratives centered on imaginary elements, distant from reality, they easily incentivize children’s imagination. Therefore, we engage children to create their own illustrations, providing guidelines on how to develop and share them as notes and comments on the website. 

To help children create visual elements for the stories, we present two tools: Dreamstudio, an online platform that generates illustrations using AI, and Animated Drawings, an online tool that creates animated versions of simple sketches. We also have a chapter on the website that showcases a collaborative album of illustrations shared by the audience.

In addition to these elements, we have a special section on the website with the author’s story. We present it as an interactive timeline using Storyline.

What I plan to present as a final project

For this project, I plan to launch an initial version of the website. This version will be developed in two phases:

Phase 1: Text and audio only

November 16th – November 27th

In this initial phase, the website will present only three stories with their respective audio versions. We’ll share the website with a small audience and ask for their collaboration in illustrating each story. We should collect their feedback on their experiences reading and listening to the stories and their thoughts on using the tools we suggest to generate illustrations and animations.

Phase 2: Illustrated tales with audiograms

November 28th – December 5th

Based on the contributions and feedback collected in Phase 1, Phase 2 will present the three stories with illustrations created by the audience. We should also develop audiograms with these images, which can be shared on other platforms, such as Youtube.

Inspirations

This project was inspired by the Manhattan Transfer project, a digital annotated version of the book written by John Dos Passos. Similarly to Contos Maravilhosos, this project also uses a WordPress website to present the story, which is illustrated by AI images. It also engages collaboration by using Hypothesis, a plugin that enables users to share their thoughts on the reading.

Our group (Raquel, JP, Patricia, and I) did a digital annotation of Manhattan Transfer and chose to use platforms and tools like WordPress/Kumu/Midjourney/Headliner to present multimedia paratextual elements. I am responsible for drafting the About page, the character map, and AI-generated images for some scenes in the novel.

John Dos Passo writes this novel like a reporter who combines incidents, lives, conflicts, and monologues into a flashing continuity. The novel is like a remix of several films with the theme of metropolitan New York. Our group discussed why this novel has never been adapted into a movie/TV series and how we invite readers to do things with it if their first reading experience might be quite fragmented.

I am inspired by the method of character mapping used in novel writing. For example, writers use character mapping to decide which character must stay and what the conflict/nexus is. My mapping of characters in Manhattan Transfer aims to give readers a possible starting point to understand interactions in the novel and explore some abstract ideas that lie behind some potentially less popular scenes. If readers look at my character map, they might ask who the protagonists are, how certain characters are connected, and where/why a peripheral character appears. One peripheral example I chose to include is Anna Cohen, who only shows up a few times but is an interesting woman who shows resistance in her personality. Raquel helped me develop my map into a more interactive one using Kumu and we added AI-generated images for scenes to the Kumu map as well. By introducing some peripheral characters, I am not suggesting a completely alternative reading of the novel but would like to encourage readers to pay attention to some invisible roles/scenes.

The next question is if we can restore the documentary effect in the novel through visual presentations and invite readers to contribute to our site by reproducing their favorite scenes. Patricia and I discussed book covers and how images of steamboats are used as icons of the 1920s New York. JP sent us many photographs of the NYC streets in the 1920s. After reading Patricia’s introduction to artists like George Grosz, I decided to choose some scenes in the novel and test Midjourney to see if this AI art tool can help me produce visual adaptations of scenes in Manhattan Transfer.

We have an AI Images page on our site where I wrote the rationale behind our decision, links to tools, and keywords/passages I chose. In addition, my AI art attempts are connected to the character map so that readers can also try it out by selecting the characters/scenes and following/challenging my keywords. For example, I wanted to keep the metropolitan style, urban modernism, and expressionism in his writing, so I included keywords like metropolis, aquarium effect, George Grosz, and 1920s. I adjusted my works several times with Midjourney to find a balance between abstract and photorealistic. Raquel also designed a comment-posting feature for our site for readers to interact with the text, images, and us. Please see the examples below.

Keywords: brick houses, lamplight, policeman, metropolis, leaned out window 

Keywords: Broadway, New York, 1920s, a young couple, store windows, electric signs, aquarium effect

Keywords: skyscrapers, a scudding sky, follies girls, a lonely man, George Grosz

Keywords: department store, Brooks Brothers, fitting room, two men in the same suits, New York, 1920s

Finally, to give readers basic directions to our site, we designed a navigation bar and used internal links on the About page. The info on About page is pretty concise, which serves as an amusement park map. Visitors certainly will find many surprises while going to different sections. A lot of surprises are hidden via the Hypothesis annotations. Imagine a message board at the exit/entrance of a museum! We want readers/visitors to bring back some memories of Manhattan Transfer and leave their footprints at our site. We were once debating whether we used too many additional tools and might overload our visitors but by looking at the final result, I think we carefully and beautifully crafted them!