Gateway: We Are Standing Outside the Site


Welcome to The Peter Greenaway Public Library Project. Though this project was conceived of to fulfill the final paper requirement for LIS598YA at the University of Washington for Spring Quarter 1997, it is certainly in the spirit of this project that it might also be found accidentally by those wandering the internet, probably looking for information on Mr. Greenaway. Hence this little bit of introductory text. Please be warned that due to limitations on the length of the document (whatever that means in a hypertext environment), this study is defacto a brief and sketchy overview, and not the more in depth analysis this kind of project deserves.

This site is navigated via the three linking options available at the bottom of each page. In keeping with the theme of the class (literary theories of the nature of authorship and readership in the age of digital text), different options of how to travel through this text have been made available. They are:

Authorial Intent: Read the project as I would intend it to be read if I were handing it in in a traditional format. The boring choice. What does that say about you as a reader if you chose this one?

Randomly Generated: Dice were thrown to determine the order of the sections. This arrangement as implemented isn't truly random, in my opinion, as it doesn't allow for the repetition of sections -- that could have been accomplished with a java or cgi script, but I didn't quite have time to write one.

Alphabetical Order: The old stand-by of ordering schemes. Actually, the ordering of this project alphabetically by the section titles is just an arbitrary way of randomizing the elements, but it appears to have some kind of logical order (how like a library!).

So take your pick. I do not know what might happen if you switch between these 3 choices in mid stream. Probably something really interesting.

Pages with images on them will have their image credits at the bottom of the page, as well as a link to the full-size image. There are no links provided from the images, and you will have to use the 'Back' button on your browser to return to the text.

Ken Thompson
6/11/97



Travel to Next Page by: Authorial Intent --- Random Generation --- Alphabetical Arrangement