This web site serves as an excellent example of an electronic essay. Growing out of a project for a graduate course titled "Built Forms and Landscapes of the Great Plains," this site has evolved into something more than was intended when it was designed. This evolution is a manifestation of new media concepts at work.

Like a lot of good history Kevin Roe's essay was born of curiosity and self-discovery. As he developed this site an overarching question emerged; "Why spend time thinking about a tiny place in the middle of one of America's most infrequently visited (let alone considered) states?" To help the visitor answer this question the author has deployed the tools of the electronic narrative in an elegant fashion. After just a few minutes the site begins to evoke the essence of Brainerd, Kansas. The stark layout, the use of photographs, and the telling of the stories of the all set the mood.

Part of what sets the mood is that the technology does not intrude on the narrat ive. He uses frames in the layout of his pages. This is usually annoying to the visitor to a site because an author will over use them. Here one is hardly aware that frames have been used. The end result is that the site is easy to navigate and most of the screen space can be devoted to the essay.

Breaking the essay in to small manageable sections also helps create the mood since continuous scrolling down long pages distracts the visitor. A trick used to keep the sections short is to link to the photographs and illustrations rather than imbed them in the text. This keeps the photographs from intruding on the flow of the narrative, but still making them available should the visitor desire to see them.

The one new media tool that changes this site from an essay placed on the Web to true electronic essay is the guestbook. A majority of the entries are by people who had lived in or near Brainerd, attended school there, or had relatives there. Their stories expanded on essay to make it something more. This type of participation would be possible except through this new media format. First of all the essay might never have been published in the traditional media and if it had it would not have reached the same audience, those with personal connection to this place. While the author made the following statement with regards to those he interviewed it applies even more to the contributors to the guestbook: "Clearly, their relationships to the present-day Brainerd were intertwined with their remembrance of Brainerds past, suggesting that collective memories of a very small place like Brainerd may exert a sustaining force more powerful than the economic engines that spawned and then abandoned the town."

Returning to Mr. Roe's original question, while I've never been near Brainerd, Kansas I've seen many places like it. The West is hundreds of these small towns that have passed or are passing into history. With the coming of the Interstate Highway System nearly all of them a passing away unnoticed off over that rise or behind that grove of trees. Sites like this one help use remember these places and understand the people who lived in them.

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