The Prezi Interface:

Prezi is a cloud based software tool delivered as a service over the Internet with numerous capabilities for writers.  Prezi was launched in 2009 and distinguishes itself from other software through its hallmark zooming user interface (ZUI). The ZUI allows users to change the scale, thus allowing for both broad and detailed viewing. Furthermore, users can pan across and through the canvas and zoom in and out of specific texts or graphics.

Figure 1: Blank Prezi "page"

Prezi is a Flash-based application that requires users to place all of their material on a single “page,” albeit an infinitely large page (See Figure 1). Though some features of the Prezi interface are quite limited—until recently, users have had a very few number of fonts to choose among, for example, and basic formatting features such as italics have not generally been supported except in specific templates, Prezi gives users freedom over design features that are commonly restricted in other programs and requires users to think about issues of space and pacing in new ways.  Prezi starts from a set of templates, which govern font styles, backgrounds, and colors, allowing for experimentation, but at the same time putting some boundaries on projects to keep them from becoming formless. Tools like frames and paths act like page boundaries, grouping elements together, and guiding the reader from one element to the next. Zooming occurs automatically as the reader progresses from element to element, and can be controlled by suitable use of frames, both visible and invisible. Audio, video, and high-resolution PDFs can all be embedded within Prezi and form part of the narrative.

Because Prezi has marketed itself, aggressively, as a presentation tool and an alternative to PowerPoint, most Prezi users have gravitated to using Prezi primarily to rethink presentations.  However, the possibilities of using Prezi as a composing tool go far beyond a mere replacement for PowerPoint. Users can collaboratively author and edit Prezis as they can wikis, and Prezis are available on the Internet and users can share their Prezis and post comments on them in a way similar to YouTube and other social networking sites.

These characteristics of Prezi mean that developing an effective Prezi requires far more engagement with issues of design than is required for the “posts” common in most Web 2.0 interfaces.  Prezi thus offers a way to engage issues of design and to elevate issues of space and pacing while still retaining the ease of access and use that characterize Web 2.0 interfaces.  In doing so, Prezi makes it possible to see the rhetorical work performed by design.  And though Prezi relies on analogies to whiteboards and slides to help users imagine contexts in which they might use Prezi, these are unnecessarily limiting.  As Collin Gifford Brooke (2009) explains, Prezi breaks down the whole idea that a page must equal a slide, and Ruben Puentedura (2010) has described Prezi, more appropriately, as a “tool for authoring infinite canvas style narratives and arguments.”  As a tool for authoring infinite canvas-style texts, the possibilities for Prezi have only just begun to be explored, which is not surprising since this type of narrative is itself not fully understood or theorized.

The term “infinite canvas” was first coined by Scott McCloud (1993), within the context of developing an interactive CD-ROM version of his work Understanding Comics for Voyager. Within this context, the term referred to navigational artifacts that would have allowed the reader to expand their explorations of a particular chapter or topic. While this project did not develop further, McCloud continued to explore the concept, and returned to it in his book Reinventing Comics (2000).His webcomic "The Right Number" is an example of his experimentation with the comic form online.

Figure 2: Link to Scott McCloud's webcomic "The Right Number"

What is interesting about infinite canvas style projects, as critics have pointed out, is that these projects are themselves not in fact infinite.  They are still bounded by the constraints of whatever interface they are created in.  But, certainly, the Prezi interface offers a different set of constraints than do more familiar interfaces and consequently makes possible forms of narration and argument that users are only beginning to explore. As Madeleine Sorapure (2006a) explains in writing about Flash, “While it is clear that software doesn’t determine what or how people write, it is equally clear that different programs offer different possibilities within which writers work and that these possibilities, in turn, contribute to our understanding of what writing is and does” (412).  What is not understood at this point are what different possibilities for writing Prezi makes possible and what constraints it puts on those possibilities.  However, already it seems that there are some types of assignments and projects that lend themselves particularly well to the Prezi format.  And, in particular, Prezi is well-suited to projects that foreground issues of self-representation, including the genre of literacy narratives.