Throughout my annotated digital edition, I tried to consider the needs of my readers with every step. I chose to house my annotated digital edition on a separate website than my personal ePortfolio because I wanted the project to be the star of the webpage. I felt that if I included it with my personal site, I would not have the room to expand it as much as I really wanted to. I did not want readers to get lost in the web of other pages on my personal ePortfolio and I also wanted the annotated digital edition to have their full attention. I tried to keep the theme relatively simple for similar reasons. I thought bright colors and a busy or complex theme would take away from my work. Although my work was not condensed to one section or chapter of the book, I still wanted to include context for the annotations. To accomplish this, I took the passages that my annotated quotes were from and I included them on the primary source page. I wanted to make sure readers would have sufficient context for the annotations to truly understand why they were important. I included small editor’s notes before each passage to fill in plot gaps so readers could make sense of what was happening.

            This project was a big learning curve in many different aspects! As a biology major, I do not spend much time doing any sort of close reading. I found this aspect of the project to be challenging at first. It took some time to have the patience to sit down with a text and interpret it. I learned a lot about rhetorical strategies in the process, too. Prior to this class, I had known that there were strategies authors used, but I wasn’t able to identify them. Now, I feel like I can identify purposeful moves authors make in a text. This project was also interesting to me because it was a way to analyze how mental illness is portrayed in literature. I have always been interested in mental health advocacy, so I found it engaging to learn about the different ways it is perceived by people. From an interdisciplinary perspective, I’ve always thought about mental illness from a clinical standpoint, so it was different to see it play out in literature. Another challenge for me was to make a convincing argument based on these close readings. I struggled with interpreting the texts enough to make an argument from it. Sometimes, I felt like I was reading into things that weren’t even there! I soon realized that this was all based on how I wanted to interpret the text, which helped me to loosen up mentally. 

            The most exciting part of this project was our use of digital tools to present our editions to the world. I would consider myself a fairly experienced ePortfolio user; however, I haven’t used ePortfolio on a regular basis since my freshmen year. Even then, for my ENG110 class, we didn’t have much creative liberty in structuring our websites. Because of that, I found it really enjoyable to carve out and construct our projects on our own! I was really entertained by browsing the different themes and playing around with various settings and designs. There are many skills from this project that I will carry forward. Being able to closely read and interpret a text is important across all disciplines. I think having that skill will only improve my position in my field. The ability to analyze a topic across disciplines will also be very useful. Using digital tools in this capacity is definitely one of the many skills that I think will translate well in the real world. With the current world situation, being as versatile as possible will be a valued trait. I look forward to bringing these skills with me into the future.