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This page is a quick 'dump' of some of the lessons I've learned while expanding my James Joyce pages over the last few months.I may be unique among Joyce-scholars in neither studying Joyce for Joyce's own sake, nor for academic prestige (which I think are the two most common motives).
On the one hand, I came to Joyce via AI (artificial intelligence), and still hope ultimately to find the underlying structure of Finnegans Wake, which I think will supply a precise analysis of human motivations, that can serve as a 'Yahoo' category-hierarchy for complex psychological content. [more]
But in the shorter term, creating a detailed Joyce website has turned out to be a rich and rewarding testbed for hypertext design theory.
I had spent most of 1998 and 1999 exploring the Web for the Web's own sake (ie, not Joyce-related), cultivating my search skills, identifying useful resources, and identifying some basic considerations that made websites more (or less) readable. (Briefly: keep it simple, fast, considerate.) [more]
But I'd also started experimenting with 'resource pages' and 'one-layer topic portals' that tried to arrange literally hundreds of links on a given topic into a compact, useful format. [more] This progression started with my overview of Joyce-sites [qv] which tried to concisely describe the most useful features of each site, and to arrange them with the best ones first. [theory] Its success was described this way by one kind visitor:
"Here's where my hair stood on end. This page lists site after site for Joyceans... I could spend months swimming here... The site overall is inexhaustible. No frills, witty brevity and a means to splendid ends." [source]My followup was an attempt to compress that overview still more, into a 'one-page portal' [qv], by linking to individual pages rather than to whole sites, and by clustering similar pages, and by reducing my descriptions to a single word in most cases.
As an afterthought I included some 'news' headlines, which immediately seemed to me the most successful feature of the page.
Gradually, though, I've grown dissatisfied with the extreme degree of compression here, because it locks out some newcomers, so I'm planning another generation that moves back a step or two towards the original 'overview' model.
Aug2000: I decided to combine this with my main Joyce homepage
Ulysses overviewAnother page that's worked well is the Ulysses overview [qv], that starts with a short summary of each chapter, and adds links on a chapter-by-chapter basis to all the individual pages relevant to that chapter.
This design strategy takes a little more effort-- instead of linking once to, eg, the 'Ulysses for Dummies' comic, I link individually to each chapter. But since Ulysses is so complex, it's usually studied one chapter at a time anyway, so this design lets users quickly inspect all the resources for any given chapter.
(There's an unsolved complication, because some excellent resources treat all the chapters on a single page with no name-anchors. Probably these should all be linked redundantly from each chapter anyway, but I haven't done that yet.)
At the end I include a poorly-sorted heap of general links, that don't really do justice to the content.
And I've tried to add some juicy bits like maps, images, and quotes, just to make the page livelier (cf the portal's news headlines).
MapsI really enjoy making maps, and with minimal PhotoShop skills it's ridiculously easy. You just start with a suitable map from elsewhere on the Web, scale it to your needs, and trace just those elements you want to emphasize.
I like to create maps that fit nicely on a 640*480 screen, but I use HTML's HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes to double their size for 'zoomed' inspection. [eg]
My most extravagant effort begins to trace the paths of two dozen characters in the Wandering Rocks episode, on an every-two-minutes basis. Ultimately this will offer a spectacular GIF-animation, but the tools I have available make this a truly enormous task to finish. [proof of concept]
DraftsI'd done a lot of careful analysis of early Finnegans Wake drafts that no one was reading, so to make it more accessible I created a series of pages like this for ROC that present several versions of a vignette in sequence all on the same page, with a simple frame that allows them to be compared two at a time.
These comparison-frames proved so useful that I ended up having to create (and maintain, eg when URLs change) way too many, so I created a JavaScript bookmarklet that effectively substitutes. [examples]
ColorsMy longterm plan for my site as a whole is to use background colors to indicate subsections: Joyce is greenish, my personal pages are purplish, political issues are bluish, etc. I'm hoping that I can indicate, eg, how serious a page is by how light the background color is. And when a page like this one overlaps two sections (Joyce, plus web-design), its color may blend their colors as well (the web-design section will probably be yellowish or tan).
But the default link colors (blue and purple) look horrible on a green background, so after much fiddling I've picked substitute shades of the background color-- a brightish one for unvisited (to draw the eye) and a greyer one for visited links.
If you choose these colors wisely, I'm sure the page can look quite tasty-- but I don't have that skill quite yet.
Using shades of green for highlighting (as in the ROC draft-page linked above) seems less satisfactory to me, but it's definitely more readable than bold.
Inline linksIn general, I reject en passant links (aka 'blue raisins') that disrupt the reading eye, and fail to describe what they're linking to. Better are text-buttons [more] that are unobtrusively descriptive.
Text layoutI try to avoid tables completely, and to use only the simplest HTML tags: P, BR, HR, B, I, BLOCKQUOTE, and occasionally PRE.
I rely on blockquotes to provide visual variety, and for pages with lots of text I blockquote the long paragraphs to supply more whitespace.
I use PRE to lay out text tables, if possible. (It makes them more accessible than HTML TABLEs, eg cutting and pasting into email.)
Hyper-annotationI didn't think there'd be enough material online about 1904 Dublin to make hyper-annotating Ulysses practical, but I ran a trial using Robert Stone's Damascus Gate which is set in modern Israel. My page of notes [qv] turned up lots of fun tricks, including maps, images of places, and Amazon.com samples of mentioned music.
My next experiment was to take Don Theall's existing etext of Finnegans Wake and trim away the most difficult passages, adding some explanatory connecting text, and a few hyperlinks. [qv] When MP3Lit.com posted Joyce's reading of the ALP section on their site in February 2000, I extended that passage with a lot more notes, and started to believe there were a lot more Ulysses-linkable resources than I'd thought. [ALP]
So the seed of my Ulysses annotations was a quick gleaning of Amazon and MIDI song samples, followed by etexts and images, and very quickly encyclopedia articles, etc etc etc [qv] This grew with lightning speed, and I continue to be astonished daily by the wealth of resources provided free by non-Joyceans.
With the Wake and Ulysses, I also experimented with (slightly) colored text as a way of differentiating my notes from Joyce's text. A new condensed-Ulysses project takes this even further: [qv]
Special topicsFor me, one of the most interesting things has been how new pages have suggested themselves, unpredictably.
Because so many undergrads surf the web for Dubliners info, I created a half-assed page of Dubliners resources: [qv]
Because I could find no good page that covered them individually, I created special topic pages for Oliver Gogarty [qv], George 'AE' Russell [qv], and John Eglinton [qv].
In order to keep track of all the Irish lit resources I stumbled across, I created a densely linked timeline that I think is one of my richest special-topic pages: [qv]
Since I was doing the same sorts of search over and over again, I combined and customised them into an FW search console: [qv] which spun off a faster-loading Ulysses console: [qv] and a Ulysses etext page; [qv] and a general etext page: [qv]
Because there were more than a dozen photos of Mulligan's Martello tower, I picked the best wide-angle and created an imagemap that hotlinked the rest, differentiated according to the locations they were shot from: [qv]
I found some 3-D panoramas of Dublin, and created Joycean commentary for them: [qv]
The ever-growing profusion of Joyce-related images forced the creation of a special index page: [qv]
Because the geography of Sandymount strand is especially problematic in Ulysses, I dedicated a page to it: [qv]
Because I'm a big fan of Raleigh's biography of Bloom, I duplicated it with hotlinks to the text: [qv]
When I found online an etext of the exact Odyssey translation that Joyce favored, I started a page about Homeric references: [qv] and that spun off a page about the other translations, and the Odyssey in general: [qv] (Yahoo linked this last one and it rocketed to near the top of my site, for daily pageviews. Feedback suggests it's targeted to too sophisticated an audience, because many visitors are schoolkids.)
I needed a page of Shakespeare resources, and gave it a special Joycean spin by framing it with Joyce's own biographical-Shakespeare notes: [qv]. (Dante and Milton, etc will likely follow.)
MiscI had a page where I identified many likely Joycean leitmotifs, and I realised I could link this to the online concordances and create a powerful tool for researching these: [qv]
I took advantage of the existing Ulysses etexts to create some 'added value' versions of Penelope (with linebreaks) [qv], of Circe (with HTML-optimised formatting) [qv], and Wandering Rocks (re-arranged into a minute-by-minute chronology) [qv].
I tracked down dozens of notices about Bloomsday celebrations over the last few years, to make future celebrations easier to connect with: [qv]
And out of silly curiosity, I created a page devoted to the year 1904: [qv] and another-- that's turned out to produce some fascinating insights-- about the prices Joyce cites in Ulysses: [qv]
Special topics:
surfing-skills :
url-hacking :
open content :
semantics :
pagelength :
linktext :
startpages :
bookmarklets :
weblogging :
colors :
autobiographical pages :
thumbnail-graphics :
web-video :
timeline of hypertext
Anti-XML/W3C/etc:
structure-myth :
page-parsing :
firstcut-parser :
html-history :
semantic web
Design prototypes:
topical portal :
dense-content faq :
annotated lit :
random-access lit-summary :
poetry sampler :
gossipy history :
author-resources :
hyperlinked-timeline :
horizontal-timeslice :
web-dossier
Website-resource pages:
RobotWisdom.com :
Altavista.com :
1911encyclopedia.com :
Google.com :
IMDb.com :
Perseus.org :
Salon.com :
Yahoo.com
Older stuff:
design-lab :
design-checklist :
HyperTerrorist :
design-theory :
design cog-sci
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