Today more than ever we are exposed to an increasing visual production which affect and shape our everyday experience. This means some extra work with the tools of the programme beside text writing - but as the work is completely different to conventional student tasks, we discovered HI as an enjoyably innovative approach to academic research. Students thinking about starting a HI project should be aware that these projects can be very time intensive, depending on the depth of the project and the material used. Yet the reader is free to go his or her own path through the project by pursuing those aspects that are most interesting to him, since the project itself may offer various ways of approaching it. One great aspect of HI is that it enables you to tell a narrative you want the reader to follow, either by focussing on the visual or audio material you provided or by following the text. Therefor, the crucial question while working with this tool was what information an image can convey that text cannot and where the strengths of visual data lie, especially in comparison to solely text based work. HI offers options of working with and approaching visual as well as audio data. It is an interesting alternative to writing a “regular” term paper because it requires you to think about new options of displaying and presenting a research topic. What made HyperImage (HI) so exciting for us was that it offered us the possibility to present scholarly research in a new, more creative way. As our main goal with the “St.Art Delhi” project was to create the feeling of an exhibition that can lead you to unexpected places – as in experiencing a Street Art gallery in the urban environment – the use HyperImage enabled us, and hopefully the reader, to eventually immerse into the topic. These features were essential while dealing with a high number of diverse data, such as images, videos and text. One of the main advantages of HyperImage in my opinion is the possibility to interlink certain elements of visual data, as well as to annotate images and visual elements with metadata. In the course of ‘writing up’ the research results, it became clear how the medium influenced my approach to structure arguments differently, in the sense of positioning images, but also in terms of building a coherent (but complex) narrative. This would not have worked in the classic way of pure text along with some explanatory images. As I dealt with the broad topic of ‘Street Art in South Asia’ in both cases – individually and as part of a small student research group – HyperImage made it possible to ‘guide’ the reader through a to some extent interactive visual essay. I have been working with HyperImage in two projects.
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