Narrative Analysis

This project remixes my position essay into an interactive digital museum website. The new genre fits a research question built around visual artifacts because it lets objects, captions, sequence, and argument work together. My revision goal was to make the thesis explicit: Augustan propaganda was not only imposed from above, but also spread through the choices ordinary Romans made as consumers and wearers of images.

Genre

The genre of this project is a digital museum exhibit. I chose this form because my research centers on engraved gems, rings, and coin imagery, all of which gain force when the audience can see them beside concise interpretation. A website also mirrors my main claim: meaning is not created only by authority, but through contact, viewing, and participation. Unlike a traditional academic essay, a museum exhibit asks the visitor to move through evidence. That movement lets me turn the structure of the site into part of the argument rather than treating layout as decoration.

Rhetorical Situation

In the website, I present myself less as a student essayist and more as a curator. The purpose is both informative and persuasive. The site explains how engraved gems functioned in Roman society while arguing that Augustan propaganda was participatory rather than purely top-down. The audience is a general reader interested in history who may respond better to short sections and visual comparison than to a traditional essay. More specifically, I imagine a reader who knows that emperors used propaganda but has not considered how non-elite people could help circulate it. For that audience, the site has to define the issue quickly and then make the evidence easy to compare.

Design Choices

I organized the site so that it begins with the familiar top-down interpretation and then moves toward ordinary Roman ownership. That sequence reproduces the movement of my argument: starting from the accepted explanation and then complicating it through material evidence. The object gallery visually supports the argument by comparing state media, cheap glass paste, and personal rings within one frame. The flow matters because the visitor physically travels from official media to personal objects. A coin appears first because it represents a message Augustus could issue. The glass gem comes next because it keeps similar imagery but changes the agency behind it. The ring appears last because it attaches the image to a body and a self-presentation. That order makes the shift from state power to individual choice visible.

Research and Documentation

Because museum websites usually do not use dense parenthetical citation, I adapted my documentation to the genre. The exhibit uses concise interpretive text on the main page, then makes the research visible through a dedicated sources page with works cited, object references, and image credits. This preserves readability while still showing the scholarly basis of the argument. My issue research came from work on Augustan propaganda, the Res Gestae, Roman coinage, and scholarship on engraved gems and glass paste intaglios. I also researched the genre itself by looking at how museum pages present artifacts: short captions, object labels, image credits, and interpretive wall text. That research shaped the site's shorter paragraphs and separate documentation page.

Genre Conventions

The project follows common conventions of digital exhibits: short wall-text style paragraphs, visual emphasis, guided navigation, object captions, and a clear path through the material. These conventions help translate academic research into a more accessible public-facing form. The strongest convention is side-by-side comparison, since it makes the difference between official and privately owned imagery concrete. I also deliberately repeat the thesis in headings, captions, and the final takeaway. That repetition would feel heavy in a formal essay, but it works in a website because readers often skim, jump between sections, or spend more time with images than prose. The site has to keep re-anchoring the claim.

Revision Focus

In revising from essay to website, the main improvement I needed was greater explicitness. Informational sections alone were not enough; the argument had to be stated clearly in headings, captions, and transitions. For that reason, the final version repeats the thesis in visible places so the persuasive purpose does not disappear behind historical background. The most important revision was rewriting the object text so that each artifact does argumentative work. The coin no longer simply identifies a historical object; it stands for official circulation. The glass gem no longer simply proves that glass paste existed; it shows how access changes propaganda. The ring no longer functions as a neutral example of jewelry; it shows how an image becomes personal when someone chooses to wear it.

Process Reflection

My composing process changed because I had to think in screens instead of paragraphs. In the position essay, I could rely on topic sentences and long explanations to connect the sources. In the website, I had to decide what a visitor would understand after only a few seconds with an image and caption. That made revision more recursive: I moved between writing, checking whether the visual order supported the claim, and rewriting plaques that sounded too neutral. The most difficult part was avoiding a beautiful but passive museum display. I am most proud that the final version now uses the genre itself to argue: the visitor does not just read that propaganda moved from the state into private life, but experiences that movement through the structure of the exhibit.