Thursday, March 5th: Project 1 Statement

I wish to tell the story of a handful of (fictitious) musicians as they meet, form bands, break up, form new bands, break up again, change names (maybe even change sexes), change music styles, forge solo careers, get back together for a reunion, break up again, and so on. The reader will learn about the events in these characters lives by reading a collection of liner notes from the characters' various CDs, all of which will be presented in the form of a virtual CD collection on a virtual CD rack. The reader can pick up a CD (by clicking on it's picture) to get an almost encyclopedic amount of information about that particular CD: first the simple catalog information, such title, author, cover art, musical genre, maybe even ISDN number, and a reviewer's rating (0-5 stars); then slightly longer information, such as names of the band members and the instruments or parts they play in the band, and a track listing for the CD; then longer, textual information (which will be the heart of story), such as liner notes, the band's entry in the All Music Guide, and maybe reviews or articles from music magazines.

The liner notes will generally describe the make-up of the band and how they came to record that particular CD and the significance of the songs to the artists' lives, and other album-specific information. As the author, I want to keep the information exciting and relevant to the lives of the characters, but I will also have to struggle to keep the text realistic as liner notes, which means it can't digress too much from the particular album (of course, "Best Of" and "Greatest Hits" albums can tell the whole story of the band's life, if they want). When liner notes become too restrictive, I would like to also include entires from music encyclopedias (such as the All Music Guide) and articles from music magazines, which can digress into anything they want. I will probably use these sparingly, or not all, but not having written the story yet, I don't want to rule them out. However, if I can make a successful story with just liner notes and brief excerpts from other sources, then I will.

The interface will consist, at the top level, of an image of a CD rack with CDs which can be individually clicked. When clicked, the viewer is brought to an encyclopedic-looking entry for that CD--something right out of CDNow's web site. That is, it will have a picture of the album cover, catalog information, a track listing, etc. I imagine this might be too much stuff to put on one page, so I might have to think of a way to break the information into subparts which are accessible from a "top" page for that CD. Also, if the image of the first page is of a personal CD collection, as one might have in a home, then an impersonal catalog-looking page might not be appropriate. I will have to think about either making the top-level page have the image of a CD rack in a music store, or find a way to make the individual CD pages look more personal--maybe the information on it could be more personal, such as having the band's signature on the CD, pictures of concert tickets or concert photos, and maybe the owner's personal comments on the CD and the band. I think that would be more fun to make, but the story I'm trying to construct couldn't really be told using those sources of information. I'd have to rethink what kind of story I wanted to tell, if I want to go the way of the "personal" CD collection.

Anyway, once on the page (or pages) for an individual CD, there will be links everywhere to other CDs. There will be links to other CDs by this band, links to other CDs in this genre, links to other CDs by a particular producer, other CDs by individual band members, and so on. More importantly, I hope to have many links in the large textual parts (i.e. the liner note): events, band names, musician's names, CD names, song names, and concert venues, when mentioned in the text, will all be linked to other relevant CDs.

One problem I think I might encounter is that some of the links I suggest in the paragraph above could link to more than one other CD. I will somehow need to break these down so that each links goes one place when clicked. One possibility is for the linked the page to be just a list of relevant CDs from which the user is free to select. Another possibility is to randomly select a new CD for the reader each time he/she clicks on a link, maybe giving preference to CDs which have not yet been seen. Third, the links could all be static, maybe even in a "loop" like some groups did for assignment two. And I guess a fourth option is to open all the possible links, by having multiple frames or windows. This is a real problem that was encountered in assignment two, but which I didn't feel was fully solved.

The story, as I said, will revolve around the lives of several pop/rock musicians. I will construct the story so that it is appropriate for the multi-sequential medium. The characters' lives will intertwine, meeting and parting at various times--hopefully around interesting events, such as the formation of a new band after a chance meeting in an unexpected place, the death of a revered memeber of band, a music awards show, a private party, etc. The characters will have changing relationships with each other, bands will form and split up, producers will discover new bands and nurture them and then suddenly stab them in the back or maybe the band will decide to leave their manager/producer, and so on. Hopefully it will be a little more interesting in the final product--I might have to throw in some sex and drugs to spice things up.

I just want to mention two other things I will consider when writing this narrative. One, I will have to think through the logic, or the compelling reasons, for each link. On page 157 of HOH, there is mention of links being like the ability to follow characters as they exit one scene and enter another. I think that's a wonderful example of the power of links, and would like to make my links as narratively significant as that, rather than just superficial or convenient. I really don't know how I can do that given the project I'm proposing. Second, I think I really need to shape and limit the encyclopedic nature of this project. That is, I'm presenting all these "scenes" and events and letting the reader move between them in his or her own way, but I would still like guarantee that the reader gets a (if not the) meaningful story out of it. The idea is that there are multiple paths through the story, but not all possible paths are worth telling. I don't know how this would be implemented. In a simple situation, there might be a set of "most important events" and the author could structure the links to guarantee that the reader saw all the important events before ending or leaving, but that's too simplistic a view to do justice to complex stories and might even be impractical for large stories.

And I guess there's a third consideration, which is seen on page 159 of HOH, which has to do with expectations. The reader should have some expectation of how the page he is going to (when clicking on a link) connects to the story he has read so far. In my proposal, I suggested how links will make sense as connections from one CD to another, but as for the narrative being discovered, there is little sense of how the pieces connect (in time, or space, or whatever). Giving the reader an idea of this before the link is taken might be difficult (except maybe if the object clicked on is a place or a time in a timeline), but I think there are many things I can do to make the distination page indicate its position within the other pages (by making the style or color or the actual text indicate the time, space, and characters involved).