This is a review of the piece of digital literature Fight the Ship: Death and Valour on an American Warship Doomed by its Own Navy (Pro Republica, 2019) evaluated using the effect on the reader of the conceptual frameworks of grasp, figure, and memory as outlined by Bourchardon and Heckman (2012).
This work was published online by Pro Republica, an investigative journalism newsroom, which has a strong reputation within online reporting due to winning the first ever of The Pulitzer Prizes (2019) for an online work. The work is accessed from Prorepublica.org and consists of white text overlaid over a variety of mediums such as computer generated videos, maps diagrams, movies, and cartoon drawings.
Grasp was achieved easily for the reader with this work as it was accessible through a secure https website hosted by the publisher. I was able to access it on any device with a browser including computers with different operating systems and my smartphone; it functioned as intended on all of these. Within the work itself all but the initial non-text media was activated by scrolling down until the narratively relevant media for that part of the text popped up providing visual depth to the page as well as mental depth in the experience of the story being told. The work is substantial in length and the reader only realises as they navigate down the page how little the scroll bar moves down compared to how much content they have digested.
Figure was the most utilised aspect of my evaluative criteria within this work and the experience and excellence of Pro Republica in digital delivery was evident. The non-text media was used sparingly. For example to set the scene when you open the work and the background image is a computer generated shaky first person blurred double vision scene of moving around bulkheads and towards stairs. These images are effective in foreshadowing the confusion and context of the story to come and place the reader within the crisis that is about to unfold. Larger passages of text are broken up by sections with non-text media and small amounts of text and in doing so the narrative adjusts to cater for the different bandwidths of the human senses. Busy images with walls of texts would overwhelm the reader so instead once the reader scrolls past the first visual representation on the ships collision they receive just a couple of sentences before the visual representation enhances again to provide further information related to the narrative of how many degrees the ship was turned in its collision and then with more scrolling a change of perspective to show how much the ship was listing at three different points in the incident.
The interaction of memory and this work are multifarious. The story itself is a tragedy that the military power structures did not have interest in providing clear access for the public. This is part of the function of the fourth estate to research and disseminate stories that others do not want remembered. The post modern way that the narrative is constructed with different characters reminiscing from different parts of the debacle and the automatic repetition of non-text elements until they are scrolled past push the story upon the reader. An additional memory feature is a subscription option specifically for updates on this story. The reader does not have to remember to look out for developments if they are interested in them but instead allows Pro Republica to do that memory work for them.
The intersection of text and other media within this work felt like it did enhance the work. Details that were better communicated visually were done so. The subscription options connect to the social aspects of digital literature albeit in a web 1.0 sense; finding a trusted content producer and choosing to continuously receive material from them. News organisations have always told stories to entice readers but the opportunities of digital literature provide scope to add further depth of content, interactivity, and increase the scale of transmission to potential audiences.
Grasp 4/5
Figure 4/5
Memory 4/5
Reference
Bourchardon, S., and Heckman, D. (2012). Digital manipulability and digital literature. Retrieved fron http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/heuristic
Pro Republica. (2019). Fight the Ship: Death and Valour on an American Warship Doomed by its Own Navy. Retrieved from https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/uss-fitzgerald-destroyer-crash-crystal/
The Pulitzer Prizes. (2019). Sheri Fink of ProPublica, in collaboration with The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/sheri-fink-propublica-collaboration-new-york-times-magazine