More Evidence.
Better Questions.

I began this module thinking about which literary work I wanted to adapt. I considered Jane Eyre and Hamlet, but Hamlet held my attention because there are already so many ways to interpret it. That also created a challenge. Another adaptation needs a reason to exist beyond changing the setting or giving the characters phones. I needed to identify something the new medium could help an audience experience, rather than simply find a different place to tell the same story.

My initial understanding of remediation was fairly practical: take a work that exists in one form and translate it into another. This week complicated that understanding. Translation requires decisions about what survives, what becomes more prominent, and what the audience must supply for themselves. A scene can preserve its language while changing its emotional effect. A character can perform the same action while appearing more sympathetic, more threatening, or more certain. Choosing a medium means choosing conditions under which people will interpret the story.

My discussion of Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet helped make that distinction concrete. Placing Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech in the Action section of a video store gives the setting interpretive work to do. The words still carry his struggle, but the shelves introduce a contradiction between the action packaged around him and his difficulty deciding how to act. That choice made me look beyond whether an adaptation accurately reproduces an event. I began asking what its presentation encourages an audience to notice about that event.

Hamlet’s use of an experimental film to test Claudius pushed my thinking further. He is seeking evidence, but he is also arranging a presentation intended to produce a response. That does not make his suspicion wrong. It does make his method worth examining. The scene helped me recognize that information and persuasion can occupy the same space. Someone may be trying to establish the truth while also shaping how another person encounters it.

That became the foundation of The Elsinore Files, my proposed digital investigation into the Danish royal family. I want participants to examine messages, palace statements, witness accounts, images, and recordings, then consider how those materials support or complicate their judgments. The audience’s role will shift from following an investigator to doing some of the interpretive work themselves. The challenge will be making that participation meaningful. Clicking through documents is an interaction, but it does not automatically create an investigation.

The peer discussions helped me identify what I might gain and lose through that shift. Our exchange about graphic novels made me think about how an expression can clarify an emotion that language leaves uncertain. The discussion of Frankenstein raised a related distinction between understanding a character’s perspective and feeling pity for their vulnerability. The responses about Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre brought attention to narration, emotional cues, and the difference between seeing distress and understanding a decision. Together, those conversations reminded me that making a character more visible does not necessarily make that character more fully understood.

That matters for an archive built from fragments. If I remove the continuity of a dramatic scene and distribute it across separate records, I may invite closer comparison while losing context. Participants could treat a message as a complete explanation of someone’s motives when it represents only one moment. My timeline and character guide will therefore need to provide enough orientation for interpretation without explaining away every uncertainty. I want audiences to wrestle with the characters, rather than spend their energy wondering who is related to whom.

This project also brings earlier course concepts into a more consequential setting. In Module Five, I considered how proximity and spacing communicate relationships. In an investigation, placing two records beside each other could suggest a connection that the evidence has not established. Our work on ethical information design makes me question how credibility can be manufactured through presentation. A polished palace announcement may look authoritative before anyone evaluates its claims. A rough private message may look less credible even when it reveals something important. Those are design effects I need to notice, not merely use.

I also need to preserve a distinction between uncertainty and the suggestion that every interpretation is equally valid. Claudius’s responsibility for the murder remains part of Hamlet. I do not want to turn the tragedy into an endless exercise in deciding that nobody can know anything. The more difficult question is what the characters do with what they know, suspect, or misunderstand. Establishing the truth does not erase the consequences of revenge or make every subsequent action defensible.

The same responsibility extends to whose experiences receive attention. Ophelia and Gertrude cannot exist only as evidence in Hamlet’s case. If the archive repeatedly asks what their actions reveal about him, I will have recreated a narrow perspective through an apparently open format. Their materials need to make their own pressures and relationships visible, while staying grounded in the play. I must also label invented documents clearly so participants can distinguish my interpretation from Shakespeare’s language.

Accessibility belongs in that planning from the beginning. If a recording contains information necessary to understand the investigation, its transcript must provide access to that information. If an image functions as evidence, its description needs to communicate relevant details. Clear navigation and readable text will help participants concentrate on the story. Uncertainty about a motive can deepen the experience; uncertainty about how to open a document will interrupt it.

At this stage, I have a proposal and a clearer set of responsibilities, rather than a completed project. Before building, I need to map the twelve evidence items to the play, identify the purpose of each mode, and test whether the sequence allows an initial judgment to be reconsidered. My measure of success should be whether a participant can explain why their interpretation changed, including how the presentation influenced them.