Hypermedia Knowledge Representation and the Production of Ethnographic Knowledge on Hong Kong Home Culture

Although there is a lot of literature on the potential of film and photography as effective vehicles to narrate realist and experimental ethnographic tales, the use of hypermedia in creating reflexive ethnographic narratives remains under-discussed. The presentation is a discussion of the design rationale behind a website titled "Making Home: Tai Hang" (http://taihang.scm.cityu.edu.hk/#en), that i argue that hypermedia affords the production of reflexive ethnographic knowledge. The website is the result of a visual-ethnographic research on Hong Kong home cultures: the domestic ideals that participants embrace, their everyday domestic practices, and how objects in their homes constitute their home-making practices. The website represents participants' homes through four layers of interpretation: animated splash and introductory pages, panoramic photography, audio vignettes of participants-researcher interaction, as well as database. It also employs specific media in different layers and utilize multiple interconnections among media via hypermedia application to produce ethnographic knowledge on Hong Kong home culture. I argue that the meanings generated from particular media (graphics, images, sound, texts) and their interactions are multiple instead of monolithic. Hypermedia affords scholars to create complex, ambiguous, and constructed nature of ethnographic tales. The interaction of images, sound, and text also problematizes modern domestic ideal.