7th Post, Week 9

Ok, here we go! I decided to join the discussion about Robert Louis Stevenson’s website not because I am extremely, like extremely, a big fan of Stevenson’s characters (John Silver, you’re my man) but because, believe it or I was forced to do it. I usually do not glance at the readings of each week, but start working on them with accordance to the way there were ordered by Dr. Wisnicki. So when I started studying the websites, the first one I looked at, according to the syllabus was of course the Darwin Online. As I kept going down with the listed websites, I decided to write my post on Darwin Online. However, when I reached the Robert Louis Stevenson one, I totally changed my mind and I said, oh boy it gotta be about this one. So when I finished with all the others, I went to the discussion forum and accessed the one about Darwin Online to see what’s going on in there and I found out that it already has three, so I was kind of forced to join the one that is doing RLS (or was I really?!)

The homepage of RLS at the first look seems unattractive, since there is no particular feature that immediately captures the eye, but after a closer look, I think there is much to say about it. The homepage is structured in a very simple way, but I think it has it all. The quote that is highlighted in dark red, which perhaps the first thing the user looks at, is smartly chosen, since I think it says something about DH, but in an indirect way: "The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature." It is hard to believe it was written in 1885, isn’t it? Well, the “web” that Stevenson refers to in this quotation is obviously not the web we usually refer to in our class, but placing it in this context is indeed interesting. Anyway, the few introductory words in homepage are really few, but they immediately explain about the content of the website and to whom it is addressed, and simply why this site matters. I really appreciated the mentioning of to whom the content of RLS is addressed because it identified two important issues right there at the start of the homepage: the audience and the accessibility—“Robert Louis Stevenson, designed for all: academics, school children and everybody interested in learning about RLS.” One more thing about the introductory words, they seemed as if they were coming from a welcoming friend who wants the user/visitor/researcher to feel at home: “Oh, and don’t forget to check out….” That was awesome because it achieved two goals of RLS at the same time: establishing a friendly environment and prompting for its contents and materials.

Both main tags at the top and bottom of the homepage are very interesting features for the clear and quick accessibilities they provide for the visitors. They mostly provide a quick access to serve the purposes of the users, regardless of who they are, whether scholars, researchers, teachers or students. I’ve also noticed that the main tags at the top and bottom of the homepage travel with you all the time through almost every single page in the website. This makes it easy to quickly serve the visitor’s needs and provide a constant reminder of what the website has to offer. Really interesting!

RLS also has many interesting features, which I believe place it at the top of list of the DH’s websites that we looked at so far. To mention few, accessing the actual texts within RLS is done in a very unique way. Upon accessing any text, the website immediately opens a digitized version of it, which resembles the physical reading experience, with of course digital aids such as text-to-speech. When I saw that I remembered seeing such digitization of texts somewhere before, but couldn’t tell where, but when I looked around, I found it belonged to the Internet Archive, which we have examined before. The interesting part is that I was able to go to the Internet Archive from the text itself and browse all its contents without evening leaving the page of RLS. The page of the IA just opens on the top of the RLS page (or just ahead of it) and whenever I’m done with the IA, I just hit close to make the IA page goes away and return to the RLS, which physically I did not leave. Other interesting features include the one touched by our own AJ: “In the Footsteps of RLS,” which basically can only be done digitally, since the real-time map of Google, for instance, is constantly changing, so it is a way of following the travels of RLS in our modern day map. Again, this is very interesting, since it kind of answers the question: why digitizing? There are still a lot more to review, but I’ll stop here for the time being.

Reply:
You seemed to enjoy as well as like RLS as much as I did, AJ. It is a very beautiful site and as you pointed out, it is full of resources on RLS for those who are interested in teaching or studying him. The School is just amazing and it is a great place for both teachers and students to visit. On accessibility, I've just noticed that I quoted the same introductory sentence about the audiences as you did. It is indeed a nice quotation, which fully identify who is the website is targeting--basically everybody, which is great. The site also does not only claim that it targets everybody, but it puts its claims into practice and offers materials that really suit everybody, which is great thing in itself because I remember seeing a site that claims the same thing, but does not put its claim into practice.