After doing some searching, I found a nifty website that gave me all the listings of New York Times best-sellers. I had the option of choosing how to sort them, and I chose adult fiction books separated by year (rather than author or title). I used the listing of each book, author, publisher, and date to look up the matching book cover, starting from the latest 2017 best-sellers and going back to January 2010. The total number of covers I saved was 235; though, I really wanted to go back further (my original goal was to do roughly ten years, 2007-2017). However, the amount of time it was taking to complete the process was longer than I would have liked.

I used Professor Whalen’s toolkit Image Macroanalysis in Javascript to organize my images in multiple ways. It took some fiddling to get my images to be in chronological order. After messing around with file folders and file names, I finally created one large folder with each image renamed with a three digit number starting with 001 for the first book in January 2010 to 709 for the latest book in April 2017.

Overall, I am pleased with my results, though if I were given more time I would have liked to personalize the webpage even more. And feel free to take a gander at the final product.

For my own project, I am interested in comparing the covers of books made popular over the years. I could possibly narrow my search down by genre or top-rated (overall). Overall, I would like to see if the public follows the old rule “don’t judge a book by its cover” or not, since I personally believe the rule is not followed (sometimes a cover just looks so good that I am intrigued by what story it may tell). The New York Times is one of the most distinguished United States book rating lists and may be a good starting point for my project.

Through our research, we were able to show what aspects of the claim were true and how and why others were not true. For instance, the titles of the more recent articles stated along the lines of “science confirms people absorb energy from others,” when the body of text in the article itself used much less definitive language. Overall, I learned that news is hardly ever black and white, and that just because many sources repeat a claim does not mean that it is true (especially when the content of said sources is nearly word-for-word).

On another note, my group in digital studies is breaking down a Gameboy Advance for our digital archaeology project. So far, the parts are very challenging to find the history and locations. Most of my work was taken from me when my computer completely quit on me (and, yes, I tried to recover the closed Chrome tabs, but they were gone). For the first time I can remember saying, I am not optimistic about this project. It is a really cool idea and the end result is awesome for groups that can find out about their objects, but I do not think there is much hope in our Gameboy.

But nonetheless, I will try my best!

Click here to play “Wiz Kid”!

I was able to include a few details that I found really interesting. To start, I made a first screen with the ability to type in a player’s “wizard” name that will be used throughout the story. Moreover, I was able to include a few variables to change the game outcomes and options later in the story. For example, if you talk a certain way (or not at all) to the Guard when you first meet him, he may either like you, hate you, or not care for you either way. This will change how he acts towards you if you choose him to be your companion on the quest and in some cases lead to no-so-great endings. In another path, you can earn a magic sword from helping the warlock you battle, Bartholomew, from dying. Should you choose to answer the king’s summons, later in the game you now have the option to kill the dragon with the magic sword.

Through this module, I found that my goals can be a little too much for my time constraints. I really wanted to make a very complicated game with lots of variables and paths, but I was forced to dial myself back into a reasonable project. I also learned that interactive fiction has a longer history than I would have originally assumed. While I had played a multitude of interactive fiction stories before this project, I have come to respect those who make them on a whole new level.

Now, I chose this specific architecture for my site because it is warm and welcoming. I initially found this specific design through Word Press while looking for a simple and not too ostentatious layout.