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Project Proposal Excerpt

This project aims to deliver written nonfiction material in a nontraditional digital context. The subject of this website is the 18th century British literary salon, and the Bluestocking women writers who assisted in exposing the empowering possibilities of authorship. This site is designed to give a strong contextual understanding of the movement towards writing and authorship, and opts to give the user the opportunity to learn detailed information about the history, politics, domestics, and economics of the time. The project will be creating a synthesized site that provides an overview of many of these topic areas, including biographical materials, important historical images, and graphic presentation of materials.

There are two related goals in the creation of this project. The first is to provide a strong example of hyperlinked and mediated text, as well as its capabilities in educating the user. By providing this material in both small, parsed sections and as part of a larger hyperlinked network, this project provides multiple methods for information digestion. The site information is supported by an exhaustive amount of well-documented research for relevant material and images, which will be provided in small, digestible pieces for the user. It has been tastefully designed in an elegant and simple manner, allowing for the research, writing, and information to shine through as the central facet of the project. The graphic design of the site offers various navigation techniques, insuring that each user can have an individual and unique experience that will provide the same information.

The second goal is to understand and examine what qualities are needed to develop, create and implement a successful piece of educational scholarship that showcases information design, information architecture and content development as it relates to user consumption. I am intrigued to learn how digital culture and scholarship, such as educational websites, are viewed and utilized by the adult population. By creating this website and conducting an evaluation of its usefulness, I will acquire a general and rudimentary understanding of how to provide hyperlinked and educational materials.

I think this type of material poses a unique challenge within the context of digital scholarship. Instead of creating a thesis piece that articulates for the learner, I plan on developing a resource of materials that will provide the audience with basic information and a variety of resources to continue and pace their learning individually. Additionally, the complex nature of the subject area that I am trying to tackle provides a unique challenge, in that the learner will be an integral part of the learning process; in order for my project to be a successful learning tool, the audience that uses it should be educated and/or interested in the subject material presented. They will also be responsible for determining their own pathway through the material.