Memory Palaces

In doing some research for my own final project, I came across the website for a course at Sarah Lawrence College that spends the whole semester reading about and learning how to do pretty much exactly what I've proposed to do for this final project in a little over a month. Of particular interest for our class in general is the page from which you can access all the students' final projects; like us, they had to create online content, it could be critical or creative, and is generally hypertextual in form. It's useful to look at all the variations this group of students came up with, and to see what turned out well and what definitely didn't.

While poking around the site, I also came across a link to a recommended text called "The Semiotics of the Web," and its purported aim is to retrace the history of the 'universal language of computer,' that is, binary notation, and link it to that of the ‘universal language of images,' that is, a long tradition in the history of ideas going back to Cicero’s Art of Memory and various Renaissance curiosities. Part of my goal in this project is to explore how the internet functions as an external storage house for all our memories -- even ones we forgot we had or maybe never did have in the first place -- and this paper traces the historical lineage of that function in a useful, interesting way.