Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/06/13

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Subject: Re: [Leica] British Columbia travelogue
From: Martin Howard <mvhoward@mac.com>
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 01:10:23 -0700

Nathan Wajsman wrote:

> This is seriously good writing. I looked at the pictures too, but in 
> most cases I did not bother clicking on them to get the larger 
> image--simply because I just wanted to get on with the reading!

Nathan, thank you for the kind words.  Actually, this is in part an 
experiement, because I wanted to play around with how images and words 
can be used together.  I'm not sure that I nailed it with this one, but 
it's a step closer than other stuff I've done before.  In particular, 
the entrance with the "story" or "photographs" options shows this 
thinking.

The gallery should probably be reordered -- and possibly completely 
redesigned.  At the moment, the images follow the same order as they do 
in the narrative.  I was humming and haring about this, but decided to 
leave it like that.  Ideally they should be considered on their own 
merit and arranged according to visual aesthetic, rather than narrative 
sequence.  Also, while I do believe that all the images in teh story 
should be in the gallery, I'm not convinced that you couldn't also have 
images in the gallery which are not in the story: ones which elaborate 
on what is shown in the story.

With a database backed server (which I unfortunately don't have access 
to) I would play around with multiple viewpoints into the same 
narrative -- visual, textual, or combined.  If content could be served 
dynamically (and on demand) then it would be possible to do this much 
easier than otherwise, while still keeping the navigation between the 
various parts understandable.  Layered over the individual images and 
text of the story would be a level of meta-information: not 
meta-information in the sense of how it looks, but meta-information 
concerning how you tell the story and which story you are telling.  A 
true web.  Content could be served to the viewer according to multiple 
metaphors -- book, poetry, gallery, others -- and the viewer would be 
able to stick to one viewpoint, or skip between them as they saw fit.

As I said, it was partly an exercise (in many things, not least the 
tools!).  Future ones will be better -- or at least, more interesting.

M.

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