Exegesis

Exegesis

        This exegesis seeks to justify the choices I have made in the creation of my web presence. It will explore the design factors I considered when creating a consistent theme throughout the central and connecting nodes. The exegesis will also explore the reasons for choosing a blog as the central node and Facebook, Delicious and Pinterest as the three connecting nodes. It will also show how they connect to the web presence theme. This exegesis will seek to show that I have created a consistent web presence over several services.

        For my web presence theme I chose to explore Jane Austen’s novels and the various adaptations that have been made of her work.  This is something I have been interested in for some time and I wanted to share that interest with a wider audience and become part of a network of other Jane Austen enthusiasts. I chose a blog as my central node. As Rettburg  (2008, p.57) notes, blogs provide for a large amount of producers of content connected through a network. There are many blogs on this theme already and my goal was to become part of that network through links and blog rolls. Blogs can also be a popular site for knowledge contribution and this blog is a place where I could share my own knowledge, interests and opinions about a particular topic. Kim, Zheng, & Gupta (2011, para.3 ) write that contributing knowledge in an online community is a way of expressing one’s identity. This blog is an example of that.

        When creating the blog I chose Blogger because it of its ease of use for beginners. I chose a simple template, Ethereal, because I knew that images would be included in the blog posts and I did not want them to compete with the background. Customisation is not available in the three connecting nodes profile pages so it was important that the blog have a simple design to show consistency. I chose a font that exemplifies an elegant, hand-written style to express the historical fact that the novels were written long before the technological advances of even a typewriter. When writing the about me page, I emphasized my interest in the theme and expressed some personal information. This may appear like an allowance of the audience to intrude upon my privacy. This is becoming more common amongst bloggers perhaps because the rewards of connecting with a larger community in the blogosphere can be extremely rewarding (Rettburg, 2008, p.83). I also chose to use three html buttons with the corresponding icons as links to my three connecting nodes. This will make it easier for the audience to find me on those services.

        My web presence also consists of three connecting nodes, Facebook, Delicious and Pinterest.  For my profile to be consistent across all four nodes I created two images to be used as avatars and banners. The banner sits across the top of the blog and Facebook pages and the avatar image is used as an image on the blog and as an avatar across the other three nodes.

       The first connecting node I chose was a Facebook profile. Facebook makes it extremely easy to share information to an audience through their share button. Baek, Holton, Harp, and Yaschur (2011, para.4) note that sharing information, usually through hyperlinks is a major application of Facebook. The node was used to share when new blog posts were published and to alert the audience to interesting news and information related to the topic. This sharing and seeking of information gives an individual a stronger role in presenting and filtering information for a particular audience (Baek et al., 2011, para.27). In this case, the audience is those who have liked the page and therefore have an interest in the topic. With the ability to share information so easily and the huge possible audience (over 955 million users at June 2012 (‘Facebook Newsroom’, 2012)) that the service provides, Facebook seemed like an ideal node to increase my web presence.

        The second connecting node I chose was a Delicious profile. Delicious is a social bookmarking site that allows users to tag websites according to their own categories and share this information with others. The folksonomies created by the users mean they can organize their material to make it easier for them to find later (Mathes, 2004, para.42). Users can also share this organization and information with others. I chose this service because many Austen fans are also interested in learning more about the historical elements of the world of Austen herself and much information can be found online.  Delicious also has a social aspect in that sharing is built in to the system.  Users can find information bookmarked by others simply by searching via that tag (Mathes, 2004, para.45). This was a large factor in choosing this service as a connecting node as it meant that followers of the blog could also add to the collection of articles and information referencing that time period, creating a collaborative learning environment.

        The final connecting node I chose was a Pinterest profile. Pinterest is very similar to Delicious in that it allows users to categorise links and images and ‘pin’ them to boards. These boards are publically available so a Pinterest account is not necessary to view them (Dudenhoffer, 2012, para.2). While Delicious works well for information and articles, Pinterest works especially well for images. I used this service to pin images of art, craft, fashion, and jewellery that were adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels.  This service is very useful for creating inspiration boards and works very well for those who prefer visual representations of information (Dudenhoffer, 2012, para.2). Pinterest is great for targeting a particular audience (Murphy, 2012) and this is precisely how I set out my boards, creating one for each novel so other pinners could follow the boards in which they are most interested.

        This web presence was created with a specific theme in mind. It uses a blog as a central node and Delicious, Pinterest and Facebook as its three connecting nodes. This exegesis has sought to explain the choices made in creating this web presence. This has been done by justifying the choices in design and web 2.0 service for each of the nodes. The suitability of each service according to the theme was also addressed. The purpose of this web presence was to create a consistent theme across four services and this exegesis has sought to show how this was achieved.

Reference List

Baek, K., Holton, A., Harp, D., & Yaschur, C. (2011). The links that bind: Uncovering 
             novel motivations for linking on Facebook. Computers in Human 
             Behaviour, 27(6), 2243–2248. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2011.07.003

Dudenhoffer, C. (2012). Pin it! Pinterest as a library marketing and information 
             literacy tool. College & Research Libraries News, 73(6), 328–332.
             Retrieved from: http://crln.acrl.org/content/73/6/328.short

Facebook Newsroom. (2012).Facebook Newsroom - Facebook’s latest news,

             announcements and media resources. Retrieved August 9, 2012, from:

             http://newsroom.fb.com/content/default.aspx?NewsAreaId=22

Kim, H.-W., Zheng, J. R., & Gupta, S. (2011). Examining knowledge contribution 
             from the perspective on an online identity in blogging communities. 
             Computers in Human Behaviour, 27(5), 1760–1770. 
             doi:10.1016/j.chb.2011.03.003

Mathes, A. (2004). Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication 
             Through Shared Metadata. Graduate School of Library and Information 
             Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Retrieved from:
             http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication
             /folksonomies.html

Murphy, J. (2012). Technology and innovations in libraries and their impact on 
             learning, research, and users. Presented at the 2012 International 
             Association of Scientific and Technological University Libraries 
             Conference, Singapore: Purdue University Libraries. Retrieved from: 

             http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/iatul/2012/papers/47

Rettburg, J. W. (2008). Blogs, Communities and Networks. Blogging (pp. 57–83). 
             Cambridge: Polity Press. Retrieved from: http://edocs.library.curtin.edu.au

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