ABOUT OUR PROJECT

One of four projects in
HYPERTEXT SCHOLARSHIP IN AMERICAN STUDIES
(
http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq)


PART I of our essay

What started out as a straightforward publication of our multi-year research on Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cultural icon has turned into this theoretical and practical discussion of how and why this should be done in hypertext form. Certainly one of the reasons we refocused this work into a discussion of digital publication issues is the magnitude of our research. We have hundreds of pages of notes, essays and emails; hundreds of images and videoclips; and many books, articles, movies, tv programs and interviews featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger. In practical terms we cannot process all these sources quickly enough to make them accessible here. We are making this, then, an opportunity to explain the process of creating a digital publication and to demonstrate the parameters of the medium: non-linear data presentation; publishing unpolished materials; providing multiple navigation routes through the material; linking to outside material; allowing the reader to move through the material at will.

We have never been able to present the entire study without compromising the varied and extensive nature of the information we have collected and analyzed. Publishers wanted either a serious academic study with all the peripheral pop culture, artistic, and narrative material eliminated or, alternatively, a delicious and trashy pop culture biography with all the theory and ambiguity wiped clean. The opportunity to present this material as a hypertext enables us to maintain the integrity of our archived material and the tone of our presentation even as we expand and question it with links to the wild and wider world of Schwarzeneggerian information.

On the simplest level the sheer magnitude of disparate data about our subject requires a nonlinear and flexible approach to the presentation of arguments and ideas. This is not a subject that can be tied into one neat bundle but rather requires hundreds of smaller packets of information that can be approached and connected in a variety of ways. But what had started out as “central” (our extensive Arnold Schwarzenegger research archives and their explication and interpretation) has been displaced by this consideration of the connections between cultural icons, hypertext, dreams, narrative, metaphors and analogies, navigation possibilities, datasets, maps, virtual reality and everything else that goes into a complex hypertext/website.

We were surprised ourselves to find that our “project,” by the time we finished designing this site, had become a phantom, an entity much referenced but hard to find in any complete form (see a text, Poetics of Embarassment, by Michael Blitz, that was much referenced by his colleagues and which was credited with content it never had). This phantom “project” has always been made up of innumerable elements that were hard to organize even as they proliferated and became intertwined: dreams, chance encounters with Arnold, Arnold stories collected around the country, film analysis, tabloid stories, idioms and references, photographs, etc. Now we find that despite this opportunity to organize and present this “data” in a coherent fashion, it begs to be left alone, in its bits-and-pieces condition, without overanalysis and deconstruction. Thus the phantom project is still ghostly, at the edges, waiting to emerge; perhaps that is where it belongs and where we will leave it. It promises to grow (if for no other reason than that we continue to have new dreams and find new Arnold tidbits) and will take various shapes through time. For now, find it in the links that lead outside the main texts.

As we designed this hypertext we had to consider how all this information would be structured. We have taken many approaches over the years (see our list of project titles) in our more conventional writings. Some reflected changes in our theoretical interests, other reflected Arnold’s changing part in global culture. In the end, the dreams we had about Arnold Schwarzenegger during our research were the only continuous thread through our material and our lives and the only way to make sense of hypertext as a format for this presentation.

We are using dreams as a structuring element for several reasons. Throughout the project they forced us to pay attention in ways we had not previously conceived, to reevaluate our thoughts and plans, and adjust our expectations, desires and capabilities. Just as a good hypertext does, these dreams connected disparate data, not into one coherent structure, but into an ever expanding patchwork quilt that showed that we cannot compartmentalize theoretical analysis from emotions and desires, or that we cannot separate our academic and personal lives, or that linear presentations were simply inadequate for our subject. Dreams are, yes, a window on the workings of the mind (States 1997: 3) but they are also a window on the workings of our interconnected, linked and cross-referenced worlds.

This project is not complete. It lacks both incidental and essential elements (bibliographies, complete references, essays and analysis of the films, analysis of the dream data, etc). We expect to continue working on it for quite sometime, adding more text, media and navigation.


TO SEE THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROPOSAL AND PROJECT:

THE ORIGINAL CALL FOR PROPOSALS

OUR PROPOSAL

THE REVIEW OF IT

OUR REVISIONS

THE ACCEPTANCE

 


ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Louise Krasniewicz is an anthropologist and an award winning artist and digital media producer. She is currently a Research Associate and digital Media Producer at the School of American Research. Her anthropological research focuses on issues of narrative, symbolism and crisis in contemporary American communities as well as issues of digital media representation and virtual reality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

EMAIL:

kraz@ucla.edu

 

Michael Blitz is a professor of English and Thematic Studies at John Jay College, City University of New York. He has published several books of poetry as well as numerous publications on the teaching of composition. His most recent book is "Letters for the Living: Teaching Writing in a Violent Age."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EMAIL:

michael.blitz@verizon.net

Other Publications by the Authors

LOUISE KRASNIEWICZ

Books:

Nuclear Summer: The Clash of Communities at the Seneca Women's Peace Encampment (1992)

Essays in:

Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation and Adornment: The Denaturalization of the Body in Culture and Text (1992)

Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick Change (1999)

Virtual Reality in Archaeology (1997)

JOINT ESSAYS IN:

Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography (1996)

Stars in Our Eyes: The Star Phenomenon in the Contemporary Era (2002)

MICHAEL BLITZ

Books:

The Spacialist

Suction Files (1995)

Partitions (1982)

Letters for the Living: Teaching Writing in a Violent Age (1998)

Five Days in the Electric Chair (1991)

Composition and Resistance (1991)

These Now and other Poems (2002)

Or read our AUTOBIOGRAPHY


CREDITS:

TEXTS BY LOUISE KRASNIEWICZ AND MICHAEL BLITZ

GRAPHICS, DESIGN AND PRODUCTION BY LOUISE KRASNIEWICZ


no thanks to Arnold Schwarzenegger who still won't talk to us

 


presented in association with

 


back to

HYPERTEXT SCHOLARSHIP IN AMERICAN STUDIES

(http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq)