(Click Picture for link)
I chose to explore “John Ashbery’s Nest“. This website gives you a 360 degree virtual tour through the poet, writer, art critic and collector John Ashbery’s beautiful Victorian home, the “Hudson House”. This site gives you a unique insight to Ashbery’s art collection, furniture and books and it gives the audience a fun way to learn about John Ashebry’s life and work. There are multiple links you can click that will show info about the specific objects. For example, there is a candelabrum straight ahead once you enter the entrance and of you press the info link there will pop up a window with information about the candelabrum. This site also lets you listen to Ashbery read his poems, and talk about his inspirations and the spaces in his house.
The Sources for this webpage is his house, and the content of his house. The information presented on this website was gathered from John Ashbery, David Kermani and Archie Rand. This house also includes art owned by John Ashbery including a big Hiroshige art collection. The website also thanks Open Road Media for permission to use a short film about Ashbery, The Poetry Foundation for the photography of the Hudson house, as well as Yale Media and Broadcasting Center for video and audio editorial support.
For processing, the website as mentioned used a 360 degree 3D virtual tour. So you can move the picture around and see all angles of the room as if you were actually standing in the room. The website used videos, pictures and audio to support this feeling of being in the room. By clicking the links you can hear Ashbery talk about the objects or hear him read poems relating to the items. The readings were recorded in different settings specifically made for this project or recorded when reading for a crowd.
The presentation of the website was very good. It was easy to navigate through the virtual tour, but the website also had additional information that you can get by pressing the menu button on the top right. This button provides additional information about the house, the art collections, John Ashbery, general information about the website and the sources. The website is made by Yale University Library and overall gives you a different experience and a different and more fun way of presenting the information, which can make it more engaging to learn about John Ashbery and his home.
Hello,
I enjoyed reading your post for its succinctness and clarity. Your explanation of the 3D virtual tour and subsequent guide to its utilization proved to be successful! I also liked that you added the caption “(Click Picture for link), I didn’t think to click the image so that caption helped in guiding me to the website.
This post is overall successful in dissecting the digital humanities project. I think there are two areas that can be improved. First, It may be beneficial for readers if the author briefly explained the significance of John Ashbery and how much impact his work was, so that the readers can feel invested in both reading the post and navigating the project. Second, I had trouble differentiating the processing and the presentation argued in this post, as the processing sounded like presentation as well. Overall, I like this post for its ability to deconstruct the project clearly with only a few paragraphs.