I think what makes the web such an interactive and captivating platform is how much potential it has. It started off as a way to share simple documents across a network, and it’s evolved to be so much more than that. With this expanding essay “experiment” I’ve created, I’ve taken a look at how essays or articles could potentially be explored interactively. Before I explain it, check it out in the link above, then come back here. I’ve picked up a lot of inspiration from a lot of different demonstrations like these. The idea definitely did not originate with me, but I feel like I added a couple of twists so I can do my part to help these sorts of ideas progress! In my demo, we start off with a short little essay. As the reader clicks on different highlighted words, the essay expands before your very eyes! I added short, medium and long buttons depending on whether you want to explore the essay in a more interactive fashion or simply see the end result once everything is expanded. In one of the examples I linked above, it starts off with a few words and each time a word is clicked, more words are added. What I thought what interesting about that implementation is that you could add more data to a single word, so you might click the word “I” multiple times and get multiple different phrases out of it. In my system, you can do just that. In addition, from the second example I linked above, I like how the word you clicked would explain what type of expansion it would be. For example, if I wanted more exposition, I’d click the word that said exposition. In the other system, there’s no way to know what sort of extra information you’re going to get. My expanding essay doesn’t work exactly like the other examples I linked, and that’s the whole point! I wanted to explore this format and add my own little personal touch to it too! I wrote a small little markup language to create these interactive text documents. I tried to make it as easy as possible to use. Essentially, you wrap words with square brackets and separate the text from the button with a vertical bar. So if I wanted to add exposition to this sentence I’d write something like [exposition| here is where I explain more...]. If you want a word to be able to be clicked multiple times you simply add the extra text in parentheses like so [exposition| here is where I explain more (even more words of exposition)]. Now what makes this little markup language a lot more powerful is the ability to nest as many of these little pieces of markup as you want so you can create lots of hidden content that needs to be clicked a lot in order to get all the information. That’s it! I hope you enjoyed this little demo. I think there’s lots of potential with how this format could be made even better and I’m not saying everything should be written like this, but I do think that it’s important to explore new ways to present content.
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