The Challenges of Expressing Parerga—Part 1

July 13, 2009

  |   Progress on the website

Part of the reason why CDRS chose this project was to have an opportunity to do something unique. We were all very excited to have this partnership emerge. However, in pursuing an unique project, we had to be very aware that we were embarking on an unpredictable adventure, and that an online representation of parerga was not part of the traditional online academic experience.

The first, most crucial part of understanding what it meant to represent parerga digitally is encapsulated in Neni’s post on June 1, where she says:

The nature of parerga is such that the format of a printed text does not, quite literally, allow space for all the voices that contributed to the story/history I have outlined. Online is another story—quite literally—indeed.

The print representation of parerga was, by necessity, truncated to be understandable within the medium of the printed page. You can read about that process in Helen Tartar’s post from June 26. The online representation had no restrictions, which created problems of its own.

As any person familiar with the web knows, online presentation is an endless canvas, limited only by the user’s patience. However, even with an endless canvas people are not used to reading non-linearly. The history of the book means that narratives have developed centuries of user expectation, and many online attempts to do non-linear narrative, like hyperfiction, have not generated any kind of standard that could be applicable to academic writing. This presented us with:

Challenge #1: How could we develop a method that would allow users the comfort of expected narrative reading and still provide them with the opportunity to experience the “voices” in Dangerous Citizens within an appropriate context?

We started our brainstorming with the mode employed for the book’s print design, which used the idea of insets to create the parerga. The limitation of this model is that the parerga content must be short, and placing two parerga on the same page limits the amount of traditional text that can be displayed. While we don’t have that same limitation on web pages, for usability and accessibility reasons we also didn’t want to cause too much scroll, so we had a similar impetus to restrict length.

Challenge #2: How would we include all parerga and still adhere to good user interface (UI) principles?

As we read through the book and talked with the author, we realized that the many different kinds of parerga were part of the challenge as well. There were stories, images, interviews, and poems in the print version, and Neni didn’t want to stop at text—she anticipated including audio and video as well.

Challenge #3: How would we create an experience that suited both text and media?

Since our group was very aware of the “common wisdom” circulating within the academic community concerning the pitfalls of online books, we needed our process to be both creative and efficient. We knew we were navigating uncharted territory, and the possibility of going astray loomed large. Because of the prior two challenges, the process for developing our parerga solution had to accommodate changes in ideas once prototypes were built, but also hit a very clear deadline.

Challenge #4: How could we be fluid and creative in our parerga information architecture and UI planning, yet not inadvertently extend the build time?

Our solutions to these challenges will be discussed in the next post, coming next week!

—Risa Karaviotis, Production Manager @ CDRS