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James
Karin
Chris
Christine

references

"Begin your journey back to the sixties, and choose a record to spin" (Malita, 2003).

Only an author conceiving a content-driven web design would refer to hypertext navigation as spinning a record. Christine's hypertext on the music of The Beatles is effective in part because of its fascinating placement of digital images alongside analog language.

How can one use an audio player skin, itself a virtual representation of physical hardware, to play vinyl? And what is being played in the hypertext? The structure of Christine's hypertext is represented as a series of songs organized into one of four albums or "records." Each thread of the argument, then, is visually represented as a set of tracks on an album.

Christine's hypertext is a clear example of a feature of visual rhetoric in web design that Mary Hocks (2003) calls hybridity. It appears that the only parts that are missing here are accompanying audio files. How fitting, then, that the background image for the entire site is a lyric sheet with Beatles songs! There is nothing to hear. Still, it is possible to read the tracks on the records.

The juxtaposition of image and imagery, the visual and the textual, is not confined to the larger structure and design of the hypertext; it is woven throughout the project. Each node brings together a textual argument and relevant images that help configure meaning. In screenshot 5, for example, the images that frame the text illustrate a point Christine makes in the text.

screenshot 5
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Rather than merely taking up space or serving to "offset the pull of a text field," the images are integral to the ideas on the page (Shauf, 2001, p. 34). The sort of relationship between the visual and the textual captured in screenshot 5, a node Christine titled "Yesterday... And Today," is representative of the kind of work found throughout the hypertext.

Christine | multilinearity

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