I have recently been researching the history of hypertext in the context of the development of the internet, so was excited to use this assignment to explore this research using new methods. This research started when this summer my friend and classmate Emma Rae Norton and I researched and designed a Feminist History of the Internet Walking Tour for ITP Camp. I am now working on converting part of it into an Adjacent article, focusing on the 1980’s and 1990’s in lower Manhattan. The writing process has been challenging partly because I hold a lot of the connections between people and events in my head and I find it hard to write them down into a more linear historical narrative. I once tried to drawing some out on a huge piece of paper and Emma and I started to hand code a website to visualize and experience them in a different format.
For this assignment I was interested in using Twine to take the reader on this tour in an interactive and networked format. I was also curious as to whether this would help me discover new connections between places and people or more clearly visualize the strongest nodes.
I had planned to go through my Adjacent article draft section by section and add snippets of the text to nodes, but I found myself jumping around. I decided to let this happen and wasn’t too surprised that this was how my brain thought about and processed all of these dates and facts. I was also interested in what the most commonly visited nodes or links would be, so added in the code to track how many visits each page gets.
As I was creating the nodes in Twine, I also kept trying new groupings to try to find the ones that looked better visually, but eventually gave up on making it look “clean.” Some groupings emerged, but one of the main takeaways was that the connections are more complex than I had previously realized. There seem to be infinite connections I could add. New ideas for how to split up the nodes also kept popping up in my mind as I was constructing this. I enjoyed hiding little “surprises” that were harder to get to with only one link in (like Jaime Levy’s rap) and wondered if people would be able to get to them.
You can see this online version of the tour here.
If I were to continue developing this, I’d like to add photos and create pages for some of the other connections for common phrases (such as media studies) and years.