Engaged critical browsing: Hong Kong home culture presented in hypermedia

This article examines the experiential and analytical routes of the researchers-authors’ webproject
titled ‘Making Home: Tai Hang’, which investigates Hong Kong home culture by accessing
informants’ domestic world through different layers of interpretation via hypermedia presentation.
The web-project’s [http://taihang.scm.cityu.edu.hk/#en] multilayered navigation structure—playful
yet scholarly introduction, ‘tourlike’ yet distant ‘virtual’ field experiences, participants’ situated yet
performative accounts of home lives, and the researchers-authors’ inductive categorizations—
communicate multi-dimensional ethnographic accounts of home culture in Hong Kong. Employing
media in isolation and in interaction (i.e. graphic illustrations, panorama photography, interaction
of images and audio vignettes of participants’ narration and researcher-participant dialogues, and
multiple micro-narratives on objects) via website’s hypermedia nature, we argue that hypermedia
representation affords engaged and critical readings of ethnographic knowledge as situated and
multivocal, interpretive and constructed.