I have briefly mentioned some of the key issues about the incorporation, design, and organization of different media/texts in this exhibit in the introduction; I have also discussed the significance of multimodal stories as scholarly artifacts and research material in the body of the exhibit. In this section, I would like to take you to the back room, so to say, and share a few points about how and why I decided to incorporate what material into the exhibit. I will also add or elaborate on a few issues about navigational design that I briefly mentioned in the introduction.
This exhibit presents a set of highly dissimilar stories that describe very complex personal and social histories of literacy in a society that may not be very familiar to many visitors of this exhibit; so, it is somewhat ironical that I have used a rectangular frame and many boxes within it to place all the content of the exhibit, creating a largely static navigational frame. As I incorporated the different media within the organizational and navigational design of the exhibit, I also felt another discomforting tension: while it is based on video narratives, my presentation of the stories is dominated by alphabetic text. But after a while, I stopped worrying about these tensions and allowed them to characterize the exhibit because the tensions, which are the manifestations or results of the "unruliness" of the stories I am exhibiting (to borrow a more precise word from David Bloome's Preface).
I started by watching the literacy narratives of the seven scholars closely and many times, trying to find thematic patterns which I wanted to use as the basis of the design of the exhibit. I could see general similarities in the perspectives of the younger scholars in relation to the more experienced narrators, but putting the stories in two groups would create a simplistic, even faulty design. Then I tried to come up with a design based on how the narrators defined literacy, how they framed their literacy histories, and to what larger sociopolitical issues they anchored their personal stories. However, the fact that the narratives were more or less spontaneous, oral representations of memories, experiences, perspectives, and ideas about becoming literate in front of a video camera made the multimodality, the affective domain, and the semiotic material more striking than the ideational content of the stories, such as the definitions, theories, and perspectives about literacy that these scholars talked about. So, I gave up the idea of putting the stories into groups or theoretical frameworks. Instead, I wanted to highlight three key issues before I discussed/exhibited the narratives: the importance of multimodality in the stories, the need to recognize how narrativeslike these are attempts to give a coherent pattern and meaning to diverse life experiences, how we may be able to account for both the form and content of multimodal narratives like these as materials for scholarship. Thus, I dedicated three sections for discussing these three issues in separate sections, which I could have placed after (in the vertical navigation bar) rather than before the discussion of the stories themselves.
After I experimented several different navigational orders for the different sections including those for the stories, I wanted to allow the reader to remain on the same frame and use the same navigation bar at all times so that they could decide in what order they want to read the exhibit. I added a horizontal bar and used image thumbnails of the narrators within the section titled "the stories" in order to avoid too many navigational tabs and links on the screen. One of the alternative designs I considered and gave up for this reason was to place the image thumbnails in the right margin (doing this would also require a longer vertical bar on right than a regular screen height allows).
There is also another tension and consequent unrulinessin the integration of different media with alphabetic text, especially the proportion of alphabetic text relative to other media. One of the reasons for this tension, even paradox, is that I as a writer am most inclined to using alphabetic text to convey information, except when it is necessary and my technological expertise allows me to create and use another media. The other reason is that while the material I am working with is multimodal, the issues I am discussing here seem to require discursive exploration that alphabetic text largely allows me to perform. So, I created video clips, added subtitles, and placed them within the alphabetic text wherever seeing and hearing the narrators themselves would be more effective. In other words, most of the times, I use video quotes for their semiotic value—including the meaning that is conveyed by body language and facial expression; the pauses, hesitations, and fillers; image of the setting as well as the speaker; the voice and tone of the speaker, and so on—as well as for the semantic value of what the narrator says. I have explicitly discussed how the semiotic materials in the multimodal texts have enriched the stories in the discussion of individual stories. In a striking example that I discuss in the section for Bal Sharma's story in which the narrator not only switches to Nepalese language in order to address me as the interviewer/solicitor of the narrative for the DALN but also uses body language to express the sense of frustration that he had faced while trying to produce a quality video with his camcorder in a noisy apartment room. In some cases, I have compiled a series of similar moments in order to highlight how non-verbal content makes the stories a unique and powerful kind of scholarly material. One example of this is a montage of clips in the section "one world per story" in which different narrators are using non-verbal materials while "struggling" to express a point.
I also use video clips where sound and image of the narrator and their physical setting can convey information about culture, social setting, or personal issues more effectively than my words can. For example, when I discuss the sea change that has occurred due to literacy and education in the life of Awasthi, who came from a community where there was no roof upon his school and is now a professor of education at the country's only public university, it was highly appropriate and effective for me to place a video clip whose static image shows him against a sizeable library that is apparently in his own or a colleague's house where the video was recorded. In one case, I have used an image of another narrator whose literacy history starts with growing up in the hinterlands of Nepal to standing in front of a building at the University of London that he had recently completed graduate studies. Similarly, when trying to describe the complex image and the underlying philosophical concept of the third eye and the four directions in which the eyes look, I decided to simply embed an image of a Buddhist temple with the above images. While static images are not unique to digital, multimodal scholarship, the static images that videos allow perform a more dynamic function. Images of both the videos and still pictures also allowed me to juxtapose what they showed, for instance, when the images of narrators from the two different generations are placed against each other. The decision to play the embedded videos may be influenced by the visual impression, something that we can only do by reading a few words or sentences when deciding what to read and what to skim or skip.
Alphabetic text itself was also easier to manipulate in the process of developing this exhibit. Unlike while writing an article for a journal, for instance, I thought about text in terms of font, emphasis, and placement in relation to other media. For different types and extents of emphasis, I used different fonts, bold face, and highlighted text inside boxes with a different background color. Digital text and the use of multimedia allow special affordances and advantages. For example, I could use several layers of media—the background image with local scripts that are on the verge of extinction in the face of domination by English, the color of the "body" frame, and the topmost layer where new pages open—instead of a linear design. But at the same time, there are limitations of digital web text that need to be acknowledged. For instance, different browser sizes and displays can realign the texts in ways that can confuse readers as when a video clip is referred to as "in the right" or when a block quotation sits next to a video and looks like regular text.
The left navigation bar is prominent visually and by placement, whereas the footer serves to link supplemental sections like the research notes and this section about design and navigation. As indicated above, the order of the tabs on the left is non-essential, a point I try to indicate by using highlight boxes that contain summary or key points that the reader can read while skipping to other sections (all the while remaining on the same navigational frame). I have done this most emphatically in the introduction section where I deliberately avoid using the highlight boxes for "framing" the stories and discussion and instead simply say where the reader can find what in the exhibit. Analogically, while the verbal text of the introduction does briefly highlight some of the thematic issues of the exhibit, I only use the highlight boxes to greet the visitor and give them a general sense of the exhibit's organization. The highlight boxes contain more theoretical points in the theoretical sections and a combination of theoretical points with narrative voices in the discussion of the stories. I link full videos of the literacy narratives on the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives in the section where the stories are discussed.
More generally, I wanted to use a navigational design that would not make the reader wonder where they are and how to go back to some other place. This is a frame that I had developed for a number of other sites that I developed in the past few years, and the fact that the editors of this collection gave liberty to individual authors to creatively use appropriate designs allowed me to use it for this exhibit. In physical exhibits, our bodies move from one place to another and as humans we are wired fairly well to create the simulations of physical locations in our minds when we move our bodies; when we read or otherwise experience exhibits of semantic and semiotic materials that are less tangible, we create more abstract simulations for answering the question "where am I?" I wanted to create a hybrid of the two modes, that of physical space and verbal/textual space in this exhibit. I use color to indicate the reader's current location and a static frame with hyperlinks for navigation. In the case of research notes, I have also used anchors in addition to hyperlinks so that the reader can move back and forth to exact locations between text and the notes.