Engaged critical browsing: Hong Kong home culture presented in hypermedia

This article examines the experiential and analytical routes of the researchers-authors’ web-project 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.