Overall I was impressed with past students’ work and definitely looking forward to having a go myself. The community for my documentary a Jewish community, and the doc will serve to expand and diversify narratives of history. While the Holocaust and post-war migration is an important well documented historical event but there are many other rich oral histories within the Jewish tradition. I will use this documentary to give voice to some of those.
- L’infantile Blogosphere has really neat structure for navigation and fab design as well which helps. The entry page has enough information to tease and to let the user know enough about the available links to follow their nose. It is uniform throughout and, importantly it always allows for a return to the main page and therefore is draws on fairly shallow navigation. I do have to admit though, I didn’t read even 50% of the content, my mood is a little ADD right now and I was looking for pics or vids or something- text is overwhelming! Also, having researched some of these topics (Singaporean Blogs eg Mr Brown) I am pretty familiar with the ideas.
- The concept for The Shared House 16/181 is cute and something I had considered for my own documentary, but then, possibly my share house is a little banal to deserve its own documentary! I given my mood, the video was a good form of information transfer. There was I guess two streams of navigation, through people or ‘members’ and through 5 categories across the top including ‘activities’ ‘problems and processes’ ‘community spirit’ and ‘visit us’… no not for real, just an invitation to visit a blog! I did feel a little claustrophobic with to much invading my space and text that was really strangely formatted- maybe it would look better in another browser.
- I don’t know why Jenny Weight has listed this one as Indigenous Arts Unit, it’s clearly about 10 Pound Poms of which my own patriarchal linage is also strongly linked to. This was one of my favorite online docs, it wasn’t as crowed as the Share House (excuse my bad humour), in fact, as Dean has suggested, this author was definitely thinking ‘zen’ and negative space. But reading deeper than the design, the timeline down the side gives a really clear and logical guide but still allows me a choice. There’s not too much text, in fact, its is beautifully brief!
- In a Cultural Dilemma I was annoyed by the use of a link called ‘next’, to me it suggests the author is hanging on to linear storytelling. I closed the page.
- Finally for today, I liked Street Children’s attempts to use images as links, I tried similar things in the past and I do like it. I think maybe there needed to be better links back to the other children once you chose one, and I don’t know why the author set the interview to open in a new window, I think it should have been on the child’s page and it should feature!
