random thoughts on collective narrative:
1. i'm struck again how this ostensibly internet-based phenomenon is very possible offline. unless i'm wrong, invisible seattle began as an offline project, and the "chain stories" rettburg mentions can also be made without the internet. i almost did, and still want to, start a few chain stories here, by writing the beginnings and depositing them in my friends' mailboxes, with instructions on how to proceed. when i was in death valley last spring break, we wrote a great chain story. it all depends on the authors, and the relationship between them, as rettburg mentions. probably why i like "the unknown" more than "a million penguins." there's some funny stuff in the latter, but the beginning almost stopped me in my tracks. you could construe it as ironic, but still...
2. i hope that one day i write something with a full load of 'je ne sais the fuck quoi.'
3. this is really cool, especially if you're from new york.
4. i haven't read through a whole lot of the previous class' wiki, but i think i'd like it a lot better if it didn't have this page. i remember, at the beginning of class, we looked at this page first, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. i imagined the project as a failed attempt at traditional narrative. this time, i started looking at the other pages first, and i liked them a lot. i liked the stuff about yosef, but i imagine i might not have if the first thing i read about yosef was "Yosef as plumber?... That didn't really go anywhere." whatever happens with our wiki, let's not do something like this.
That map page is kinda obnoxious. The voice that authors the "important points" section is very blurby-- as in Joe Q. Blurb on the back of bestsellers mixed with Cliff (he of the notes). I like the graphic however, and it would be interesting if they had incorporated the items in the legend (avada kedavra green killing arrow, thin blue line of friendship, etc.) into the pages themselves as some sort of a action/function based grouping/chapter system.
The premise of their story is that they are a class that has to write a story... So already, the writers of the story are characters in it. However, I disliked the commentary in the story about whether or not certain authors liked what had been done. This is an example of how one author wrote into the wiki about the difficult process of collective authorship. I thought that it took away from the story. That whole page just seems sorrt of trite--as if someone just needed some closure on a piece of the narrative so they wrote in a little explanation.
Was anyone else dying to see the history of all these pages? I really wanted to know who wrote what. It would be cool to see what two pages (parts of pages) were done by the same person.
I think I liked the meta-commentary more then the rest of you (don't worry I'm not planning anything quite like that). I didn't even mind the Godfrey page, it was a little over-the-top with its instant-messenger prose, but I though it was interesting insight into the facile and superficial nature of some constructed narrative. It may be self-critical but thats a better stance then posing as the authors of the great American novel.
I didn't like the map because I felt it played it no function in the story. Works like patchwork girl take the map as integral part of the story, this was clearly tacked on at the end, and just dumbs down the reading, and kills exploration. I'm not forced to read to understand what going on, I can just jump back to the front page, and say, oh yeah I already know everything about your story. I think Timber you kind of joke but still make a salient point, even making delineation of relationships a commentary would of been a start. A more nuanced map of any kind really. As it stands it only illuminates their lack of depth.
(Post-Script- I feel bad writing this because I liked their project, and it almost hurts me to lay some diarrhea on it. Right now I would say their wiki is better, if not more interesting then our own, which I have done nothing to ameliorate. I just don't feel I am doing them any favors by not fleshing out what I see as mistakes, that might help us. I do think they did an admirable job)
We had talked about having a "stepping stones" page on our wiki that would be the allwikipages page. We had talked about it being very hard to get to. Is this database page the closest thing we will have to a map? I think a function of the map guide in their wiki was to help keep the narrative/relationships/characters straight among their larger author group. Since we are fewer and presumably tighter and our wiki, at this point, is mostly allusive rather than character based, I don't think we need a map. That is to say, I don't think it will hurt our collective wiki authorship that much if we arent totally aware of what may have changed/been added in other parts of the wiki.
I agree. The only thing I can think of now is arranging the all links page in a meaningful fashion, maybe a love-war scale or something, but I don't know.