Assignment #2: Hypertext Site Analysis

In this assignment you are to analyze one or more sites on the World Wide Web in relation to their construction, representation and manipulation of cultural or historical knowledge. Using our collectively developed lexicon of analytic terms as a starting platform, write an in-depth critique of how the site or sites present information in the context of knowledge-making. There are a number of ways to approach the assignment: an in-depth analysis of a particularly "thick" site (such as the Valley of the Shadow); a comparative analysis of two or more sites for their contrastive treatment of the same topic or materials; a set of sites that address a particular problem (three different historical archive sites; three sites that could be used in teaching Shakespeare, etc).

If you like, you should pick a site or sites that at least tangentially lets you play with the issues that you think you'll want to investigate for your final project. Your analysis can focus more on the representation of knowledge in an scholarly context, or more on pedagogical issues and potential, or more on public knowledge issues (such as journalism) or more on "interpersonal" (human-computer interaction) issues of agency, intimacy, subjectivity, interactivity, collaboration, and so on. Or some combination of the above.

The essence of the assignment is this: to carefully analyze and write about how the design, structure, and content of the site or sites work together to construct a particular kind of use and user, make possible the construction of particular kinds of knowledge, and reveal the implicit (and explicit) assumptions about the nature of the knowledge being represented. (As well as reveal something about the media being used). We should be especially interested in two things: how sites transform knowledge from print counterparts in electronic media, and how particular electronic designs are influenced by, reveal, and communicate the cognitive architecture of cultural or historical knowledge, as it is imagined by its designers for a particular user context.

You may choose any site(s), either from ones I've suggested as starting points, those suggested on the listserv, or ones you have found on your own.

FORMAT: The site analysis must be done on the Web and written in HTML and hypertext format. You will want to take the fullest possible advantage of using hypertext to tie your analysis to the specific locations of the site that you're talking about. However, I'd like you also to bear other rhetorical uses of hypertext in mind, whether it is using nonlinear patterning to construct your analysis, or simply bearing in mind some of the "signpost" issues that we discussed in the earlier hypertext assignment. It is hard to estimate length, but I would guess the equivalent of a 5-7 paper, rendered hypertextually would be about right as a standard.

DUE: Final versions of the site analysis are due April 15. Please be prepared to have a site and rough outline, if not rough draft, by April 1.