Experiment Explore

My experimentation with travel writing styles and layouts dates from the turn of the century. I was in Dresden on a German language course at the Goethe Institute. It was the end of August 1999, all the talk in Germany then was all about the process to welcome Poland into the EU.  I had taken a huge step in my career and was going to spend five years in industry, to lead a web development team for British Airways in Europe.  I had been teaching European Cyberculture at Sunderland University so my mind was full of HTML and how it could make writing more visual without using photographs. HTML sounds so artisan now as I write this.

Please click on cover to download a PDF

My piece of writing from Dresden, called ABC.HTM, celebrates its own influences and roots: Roland Barthes’ autobiography written in alphabetical order, the tradition of French song taken up by rappers, and most of all, the conceit and wit of a travel piece where the journey is unexpectedly short.  Remember, we looked at that in the previous post on Annie Ernaux?  In the case of ABC.HTM this surprise journey is a lift ride down from an upstairs apartment to the ground floor.  I meticulously hand-coded the HTML to reflect this in the margin as you scroll down the web-page.   Guest editors of the journal, Sites, enjoyed ABC.HTM so much that they reproduced it on the front cover of a special edition dedicated to the verbal, visual and virtual a few years later.

You can view or download the old HTML code by clicking the code box above

Reference

Mansfield, C. (2006) 'ABC.HTM - l'écriture numérique' in DalMolin, Eliane & Murphy, Carole (eds) Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Sites, 10(3), Verbal, Visual, Virtual, London & New York, Routledge. pp.267-274, ISSN 1740-9292.