Space
This is an experimental piece. I am interested in finding new ways to communicate ideas and information over the Internet. The interactive nature of the web is providing fresh opportunities.
So I created this webpage containing a poem I wrote about space. About the Void. It was inspired by a quotation by Andy Warhol. The webpage looks simple and uncomplicated, but it contains many subtle details designed to communicate these ideas more clearly.
First, there were the traditional choices about line spacing, punctuation, spelling, and capitalizations. But on a webpage, I also have complete control over fonts, font sizes and colors. And then there were the hyperlinks – words that when clicked, bring more information into view. These were designed to be unobtrusive, to provide emphasis, not to interfere with the flow of the poem, yet visible enough to be functional.
When these keywords are clicked, their definitions appear on the page in traditional Merriam-Webster dictionary style. I love these online dictionaries, where definitions of words contain other words that can be clicked, and defined, in a sort of endless loop. Dictionary formats are very sophisticated in their use of font faces, font sizes, font bolds, underlines and italics, punctuation, lists, parentheses, braces and brackets. And every subtle choice is designed to convey meaning.
I modified all this to help me express my thoughts more precisely. I carefully chose which words to provide definitions for. In these definitions I included entries that matched what I was going for, and excluded entries that were off the mark. I used foreground and background colors to highlight phrases that most closely matched my intentions. I attempted to convey exactly what I meant with each word within the context of the poem, rather than defining the meaning of the word in a more general, larger context.
I personally got a lot out of this exercise. I discovered that many of the secondary dictionary definitions gave me a deeper understanding of the concepts these words were attempting to represent. Including a word’s etymology was often enlightening. Knowing that the word ‘time’ was derived from an earlier word meaning ‘tide’ is very interesting. The choices made for synonyms or ‘see also’ were intriguing. For example, linking the word ‘fear’ to the word ‘experience’ has some interesting implications.
