Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Electronic elements

In the poem Soliloquy by Goldsmith there are many electronic elements that are used that could not be created on the page. You could not have the poem only show the first line and have nothing show up until you touched it. On a page every word would just show up. The reader learns to interact with the poem by moving the mouse around the page and seeing what is available to click. Clicking on everything that you can helps to reveal the poem. Sometimes there are sections before the electronic poem appears in which it will tell you a little about the poem. This can help you to know how to interact with the poem and what you should do with the poem. In Soliloquy, The about tells you that the poem is Goldsmiths side of the conversation that he recorded for a week. This helps you to understand why each line of the poem does match up. The process of interaction can be very complicated and confusing. For example, In Soliloquy, if you did not put your mouse over the whole page, you would not have realized that lines appeared as you did so. More of the poem was revealed. At first the fact that no other words besides the first line appeared might have been confusing because of course that is not all that Goldsmith could have said in an entire hour. The electronic elements can add to the experience of poetry. It makes it more interactive and interesting. It does things that cannot be achieved on paper. It causes the reader to think more than a poem on paper would. They have to think about how to make the poem work unlike paper poems in which you just simply have to read. However, electronic poems can take away from the poem too. Like, in Soliloquy, the poem would be much easier to read if it was on paper. It would also really show how much a person says in an hour or a day or a week. With all the paper right there in front of you it would be easier to see and people would better understand the concept of, you really do not realize how much you say. In the interactive format, you see the words and it looks like a lot, but I feel like on paper, it would really hit home how much is really said. In my opinion for this particular poem I would rather read it on paper than electronically. I feel like this poem could be said better on paper. You could better see how much a person actually says. Also I feel that the interaction with this poem is minimal and unsubstantial to the poem. I did not get anything out of the electronic poem that I could not get from the paper version.
In the poem Over There, there is one main electronic element that could not be created on paper. That is when you press over there the first time, it brings you to the page the poem is on. On that page, anytime you click the word over there, it brings you back to the title page. This obviously could not be created on paper. It is a key element to the poem. It shows that you do not know where over there is. Is over there the title page or the poem page or is over there somewhere else. Over there is unknown. The reader learns to interact with this poem by running the mouse over the words and when the pointer become a hand you know you can click on it. Also the things that you can click on are all in bolded and/or underlined. Once you notice this pattern, the electronic poem is easy to understand. The responses that this brings up in the reader is that they want to know why over there keeps bringing them back to the over there on the other page. It makes the reader think about why the electronic poem is doing this. The interaction with the poem has a big impact on the poem because it makes the reader really think about why this is happening and it helps them to understand the point that the poem is trying to make more clearly. The interaction with the poem definitely affects the content of the piece. The electronic elements that are added to the poetry is it gets you to think more about the poem more than if it had been written on paper. Paper could not have achieved the same amount of thinking that the electronic poetry did. If the poem was on paper rather than in an electronic, interactive format, it still would have achieved its point. The poem still would have made sense and maybe instead of focusing so much on why the poem kept bringing you from one page to the next every time you clicked over there, the reader would have focused more on the actual poem and what it was saying. If I had to chose which I like reading better, the poem on paper or the electronic poem, I would choose the electronic poem. I feel that the changing of the page from the title page to the poem page every time the word over there was clicked helped to make the poem more understandable and helped to make you think a lot more about what the author’s point was. On paper I feel that the same level of understanding and thinking would not have been achieved.

Writing my own electronic poetry helped to open up my creative side. Electronic literature allows for many creative possibilities. For each word or phrase in your electronic literature you must think how can I make this an illustration? What animation will help to portray the word or phrase better? I enjoyed figuring out the answers to these questions. It made my electronic literature more creative and more meaningful. I enjoyed the creative process because it was fun working with the animations and figuring out which illustrations would best portray my poem. In my electronic poem I was also able to express it more fully than I could have on a page. The electronic poem was more engaging to the individual reading it than the poem was on paper because it provides more stimulation that the paper version does. The animation draws in the reader and makes them want to keep reading more than the poem does on paper. I had the phrases that if I could focus and on both of them go everywhere on the page showing that you cannot focus on both of them. I was able to have words like absorb actually come out and take up the whole page, as if it was absorbing the page. I had the whole world go in a circle because the world turns in a circle. And at the end when it says and everything else disappears, I had all the other words except for that sentence disappear. These are all things that I could not have done on paper. They are also all things that made the poem much more engaging. It reiterated the concept of the paper version. However, it is easy to get carried away with all the possibilities of the animations and start to lose the integrity of the original poem. It is easy to give everything an animation to it even when one is not needed. This is why for the words in the poem that are not key words it is okay to just have them appear on the poem. Sometimes not using any animation at all says more than putting animation. Because of all the possibilities of animation the creative process can be frustrating. The creative process can also be frustrating because sometimes you have an idea for an animation that is not available to you. For example, in my electronic poem, I wanted the word widened to widen across the whole page. However, this animation was not possible so I had to use a wider font that was different from the rest of the poem. This might make the reader think that the word is particularly special because its font is different. But this is not the case. It was just a lack of animation choices. This one word was a frustrating part of the creative process because in electronic poetry every little thing can say something about the poem. This electronic poem inspired me differently than if I had to sit down and write a poem with pen and paper because I had to think about the poem differently. I had use words that would fit animations. Also I had to see if the poem would be better as an electronic poem than as a poem put on paper. This was more inspiring to see if the poem had good words such as absorb that can absorb the whole page.

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