Portfolio

Nicole Dixon


This portfolio is a collection of my work for INFO 6620: Electronic Text Design and includes work with the following technologies and standards:

About Me


After teaching for 10 years, I returned to school to earn an MLIS at Dalhousie University in Halifax. As well, I hold an M.A. in creative writing, a B.Ed. and an Honours B.A. My short stories have earned me a national writing award (The Bronwen Wallace Award for short fiction) and nominations for two others (a CBC Literary Award and The Journey Prize). My first book, Happy Meat, a collection of short stories, will be published by The Porcupine's Quill in 2012.

Contact


To contact me, please email nicole@nicoledixon.ca or visit my website nicoledixon.ca

me

Nicole at home in Advocate Harbour, Nova Scotia, post Hurricane Bill.

 

XML Project

“Mona Says Fire Fire Fire” by Nicole Dixon

“Mona Says Fire Fire Fire” was originally published in The New Quarterly issue 98 (Spring 2006) and was considered for a National Magazine Award.

Fire

Statement of Intent

My goal for this project was to mark up one of my short stories, “Mona Says Fire Fire Fire.” Though similar to the mark up and appearance of an essay, there were slight differences in the markup of this creative work, namely:

  1. images used to illustrate the work should be subtle enough so as not to detract the reader from the text or from how he/she imagines situations in the story
  2. footnotes must be kept to a minimum. Though writers often glean ideas and scenarios from life, the story is a work of fiction and resemblances to actual people and places are coincidental

In light of these considerations, my design goals were as follows:

  1. use images that not only illustrate scenes from the story but also guide the reader to particular sections
  2. use a basic colour scheme to place emphasis on the text. The story, not the design features, should be emphasized.
  3. keep footnotes to a minimum to diminish chance of fiction being interpreted as non-fiction
  4. use italics for specific sections of dialogue and narration

Document Markup & Transformation

I created my own document structure and DTD in XML to represent the structure of the document:

I created one XSL stylesheet to transform the XML:

I created two CSS stylesheets to create presentations for screen and print:

Final Outputs:

Here are HTML transformations of the original XML documents:

HTML Essay

Ban Comic Sans: Typography for the Web

Ban Comic Sans

Description / Abstract

In this essay I discuss the readability and usability of typography on the web as well as explain how traditional print typography has been adapted to the web.

Design Goals

My aim in designing this web essay was to adhere to the rules of typography discussed in the essay. In particular, I chose a readable, serif font and made sure to leave ample leading between paragraphs. As well, my colour scheme (dark background, white font) was chosen to ease eye strain. Finally, I used high-contrast, complimentary colours to attract the eye.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Archive

“The Poet's Vow”

Image of Elizabeth Barrett Browning from gutenberg.org

Goal of the project

The goal of the project was to use TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) XML to mark up “The Poet's Vow,” a long work by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The project involved applying a correct set of TEI tags to the document to achieve a document that captured the details and idiosyncracies of the text while producing a document consistent with the goals of the EBB Archives project (http://www.ebbarchive.org). I marked up stanzas X-XIV.

 

Standards:

All html pages and transformed web pages are designed to meet the highest standards of xhtml 1.0 and the web accessibility guidelines of the W3C.