I'll admit, I was a bit skeptical about the wiki at first. However, as the project has progressed, I've noticed that the project has actually started to cohere in a rather interesting fashion. This is all the more fascinating because I have not noticed a great deal of communication between the members of the class about the direction of the story. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right place, as there are undoubtedly corners of the wiki that I haven't found yet. This seems to indicate that collaboration may in fact be anonymous, that any one person may perceive how to connect the various points of the project without much input from the others. Admittedly the way that they choose to do so may not be the way that someone else would have done it, but it's generally an equally valid direction.

I just visited the site planning page of the wiki and realized that it's not a very active page (at least not in recent history). So, I'm sorry in advance to clog blog space with wiki discussion, BUT...

Night Owl and I were discussing the blog last Wednesday during class and we returned to our initial idea of a frame story. I'm not sure to what extent we've achieved a frame story as of right now, but I think it might be a useful way of perpetuating the story on the first page (I'm not sure what the technical term is). I was thinking it might be cool if we have a bit more of a setting for our story (ie. maybe we're all stuck in a room or building at school, or we're on some sort of trip in a vehicle). That way, we might set a bit more of a tone for the stories, or at least for the characters who are telling our stories. Also, we would have more of a meta-story to narrate throughout the telling of our other stories.

I think in the last 12 hours or so, my conception of hypertext has drastically changed from skepticism to new-found appreciation. It all started when I was randomly looking through our course wiki, clicking on the various links and trying to figure out if there's a connecting or overarching theme behind the mess of links and witty mini-stories.

Then, after sitting there for about half an hour, patiently going through pretty much all the links, I realized (kinda late, yeah I know) that the point of this collective narrative was to make those connections yourself and to connect the dots as we like. That sounds like a rather obvious and "duh!" statement, but I honestly did not truly understand how that felt until I decided to try it out. Part of my initial frustration with our class wiki was the feeling of shooting blindly, not knowing even where to start. It seemed to me like we were getting used to this new environment and playing around with inserting cute links rather than focusing on making a connected story with some semblance of coherence. I realized last night, though, that the process of creating a collective hypertext really does need that initial random, blind stumbling in the beginning in order for it to go anywhere. There needs to be a starting point, and somebody among the twenty-or-so of us needed to be that initiator.

So we've been working on two forms of electronic literature for this class: this blog and our wiki. I'm wondering how people would compare the two experiences. Is one harder or easier for you? Do you enjoy one more than the other? Any other random thoughts?

I find that I'm a lot less inhibited about adding to the wiki than I am about writing on this blog. Maybe it's the fact that the wiki is a work in progress, or the fact that I don't have to slap my name on my wiki contributions. I'm not entirely sure. It's somewhat ironic, because I've never taken a creative writing class in my life.

So I was looking at the website that Professor Fitzpatrick linked, Gimcrack'd, and I was thinking, "This is exactly what our wiki should be like, ideally." One of the things that I really like about Gimcrack'd is that the site looks very professional and easy to navigate. That seems to be a reason why certain blogs are popular too; the ease of navigation and aesthetics are pretty important, in addition to good content. I also liked how the stories on Gimcrack'd have some sort of linearity, some type of beginning, and that we are literally able to see the different possibilites. You start in a certain place and then branch off on different thoughts, which physically appear as linked words. You click the link, the relevant passage appears on the same page, and you can delete it if you like. Unlike Joyce's "Afternoon" in which you could only see one page at a time, this website allows you to open up almost all the links at once, and it definitely made me feel more in control. It also allowed me to make more conscious decisions rather than blindly stumbling around. It's also pretty nifty watching passages appear and disappear on the same page...it looks really cool too.

This is pretty unrelated, but I know someone in this class was involved with the Marx wiki (as well as Professor F, of course), and I was wondering if they could possibly point me in its direction? My 15 year old sister has a big paper to write on Marx and I told her I'd send her the link to it, but then realized I had no idea where to start.

Hello from Vienna! There was a presentation at my conference yesterday by the developer of TiddlyWiki, a fascinating wiki system that allows you to build networked documents both on- and offline. I was just poking around on his website and spotted a link labeled "TiddlyWikiFiction." There are links there to several wiki fiction projects that I thought you might all take a look at those projects, and particularly Gimcrack'd...

I've been stuck on this quote: "I am afraid that one of the things that makes the web in its current form so attractive is that so many of us are afraid and lonely and do not know what to think or who will hear us" (from Joyce's "Othermindedness" p52). I've been thinking about the theme of loneliness lately in connection with people who create content and put it on the web where it can be seen by a potentially huge audience. Why do people post intensely personal diaries of their life and why do people want to read them? Why do people want other people they've never met before to know mundane little details of their daily lives--where they went to eat, what they bought at Target, what song they're listening to while they're writing their entry? Maybe because these things all say something about the person who is reporting them; they convey some kind of information the writer wants you to acknowledge. But why do we want to acknowledge this information, to get some brief grasp on how somebody else lives their life, to speculate about what some teenage girl's life is like as with the whole Lonelygirl thing?

In "Othermindedness" Joyce brings up a colleague of his who asked him how he helped his students to make their hypertexts more coherent. He quotes her, "It is so seductive to write these lyric fragments and link them like music. Some of the most interesting hypertexts have a sort of senseless but shapeful beauty and play. I worry that my students will lose their ability to closely or to argue or to theorize, or at least that they won't be as willing to" (page 63). And then a little further down he talks about how he and this colleague decided that well, maybe this sensless beauty is a new way of making sense that we haven't recognized yet. I bring all this up because it got me thinking about the wiki. Does our wiki need to have "coherence" and how would we even define that coherence? Is our wiki going to be like a hypertext in the sense that the reader's choices make it what it is? Is the way we're building the wiki and how we're expressing things more important than what we're actually expressing? What are we even saying in this wiki and why would someone want to read it and what would they get out of it (and what do we get out of writing it)?

I’ve been trying to think whether there’s some way to fulfill the enormous promise that Landow and Joyce think that hypertext possesses. The class seems to have come to some sort of consensus (although if there’s a silent majority otherwise, please speak up!) that Joyce promises a writerly text but doesn’t actually deliver on his promise. As marmalade vividly put it in her last post, in "Afternoon," readers end up being rats running around in Joyce's maze, rather than equal parties to the writing process, because Joyce “expands to fill the vacuum” created by the absence of traditional editors in this new literary medium.