Entry by sgha014, tlou006, apra102, vpup001
Plan
The information sheet says that this should be a digital translation or interpretation of the poem. Helen told in the lecture that we should focus on explaining it to one particular audience. So, we have decided to on kids (explaining the poem to children). So, we will have lots of pictures so that it helps them to visualize what is going on and understand it. We might use animations but none of us know how to do that. We might even have an audio file of the poem.
Beta Version
We basically just made a powerpoint of a short story about a spider. The story is not complete yet which is ok since its just the beta version. Our beta version is on rwan005's intranet since none of us have ours set up yet. http://studwww.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~rwan064/sgha014/Presentation1.ppt
Our aim to explain the story to a child. We have created a PowerPoint presentation of a story, “Spidey’s Day” for our beta version. We have used Ms Paint to draw pictures. It is made colorful to make it look interesting to children. As the targeted audiences are kids, very simple terminology is used. Basically our story is about a spider who spins a web everyday and everyday the housewife sees it and sweeps it away and its destroyed, and then next day the spider gets up and does the same thing again. Just a really simple story for like a 7year old or something who wont understand Emily's poem.
Final Version
This is our final version. http://studwww.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~vpup001/SE250/Screencasts/SpideyPoem.swf
Exegesis
Our concept is to design a children's storybook introducing the poem to a child. Initial design specifications are
- Leave the language of the poem intact
- Include pictures to aid understanding
- Book is designed to be read and explained by a parent
- Pictures are open enough to encourage imagination of possible meaning
In the poem the spider is often being compared to other objects around it. This places an emphasis on the size difference between objects, we wish to use the pictures to help the reader visualize this. For example, the lines "In unsubstantial trade..." and "in half the period", implies the spider is hard at work, doing something, which we humans cannot see due to the size difference. A clock is also provided to help with the understanding of speed. A period is a very small amount of time, staying with the idea of the small spider.
Our pictures were also used to explain the development of events throughout the poem. For example, to explain the poet's description of the spider hanging on its own thread, we included a series of pictures to illustrate the spider moving up and down.
Pictures of the completed spider web is compared with the destroyed web at the end of the poem, letting the reader reflect on the housewife's actions. Another series of pictures showed the spider constructing the web starting from nothing. Our idea is to suggest how important the web would have been for the spider, contrasting with how insignificant the web was to the housewife.