In search of class project topics
I’m going to be creating a couple of sites for the web-design class I’m taking this fall. As far as I can tell from looking at previous students’ work, the content can be just about anything. Which leaves me with far too many ideas for what to do for my final project site.
Here’s what I’ve thought of so far. Anyone care to help me narrow it down?
- a bibliographic guide to the British ghost story
- a site about opera in the movies (movies about opera performers/performances/fans, movies that reference particular operas in various ways, movies with heavily operatic soundtracks)
- more installments of “the overeducated humanist watches TV” (no, scratch that, I don’t watch enough TV; apart from Battlestar Galactica as the Aeneid in space, and Lost as The Tempest meets Stanley Milgram,
there’d be very little actual content) - suggestions for how to live on the super-cheap (a skill set I honed to proficiency the first time I went to grad
school) - a recipe site, heavy on Italian cooking
- something about cities and walkability (i.e. an excuse to spring for a digital camera and go around Philly taking pictures)
I’m also going to be constructing a thesaurus for the content-representation class. We just got a preliminary syllabus, a couple of weeks before the start of classes. Heaviest reading load of any library-school course I’ve taken so far, but hot damn does it ever look interesting. Image indexing! Topic maps! Folksonomies! George Lakoff! The semantic web! Stuff I’ve been wanting to take a class on for ages! W00t!
Anyway, I’m waiting until I know more about the final project before I choose a thesaurus topic, but I’m hoping I can pick something operatic. Or maybe the world needs a knitting thesaurus. We shall see.
Ooh! What fun!!
I vote for ghost stories, cheap living, and walkability, with probably the biggest vote for the latter.
I also vote for ghost stories — you know I’m a sucker for the gothic. Opera in the movies in a close second.
I like the opera idea or cities/walkability.
Well, they all sound good, but I’ll admit a preference for opera, Italian cooking, and cheap living…
Thanks, guys! Someday I’ll write something, in some medium or other, about all of the above. I think ghost stories and opera in the movies might be the frontrunners for this term’s class projects, but the cheap living guide might end up as a blog post.