mapping
"Nicheworks is a interactive tool for visualising massive networks with hundreds of thousands of nodes. It was developed by Graham Wills at Bell Labs. The screen-shots here show Nicheworks visualisation of the network structure of a large Web site. "
my dissertation is becoming itself. i started talking about art and protest, but it quickly unraveled into a series of connections: protest - nation - embodiment - imagery - action - network - tourism - display - ubiquitous computing - politics - code - knitting. yes, knitting. i started by looking at knitting in terms of binary computer code (this is sadie plant's doing, in the book zeros and ones: digital women and the new technoculture). i started with the revolutionary knitters, but their own analyses didn't go far beyond the violent.non-violent dichotomy, this time couched in some pithy one-liners (this will have you in stitches, protesters needle the police, a close-knit community). i started to think that i had the wrong end of the needle.
but by following the links through knitting as a web of its own to protest on the internet, and then in the webs of the city, my dissertation came to be about the connections rather than the spaces between. no one, i think, was more suprised than me, particularly as i was the one getting wound up in it, and i was the one who eventually lost the thread - the neat 6 chapter outline that i handed in and defended. the pithy-ness comes with the territory, but ruth scheuing demonstrates that it's not without its own meaning.
in the end, well, not the end, somewhere in the middle, my dissertation became a web. it lost its chapters, it became a hypertext document, a map of itself. i lived in england briefly, and worked as an underpaid waitress in a café staffed entirely by those on their way to somewhere else. someone i loved (briefly) gave me julio cortàzar's book hopscotch as a going away present. written in 1963 it is a book with no beginning, no end, no middle. the reader, the back cover informs me, becomes the architect of the novel.
i want this for myself. i want to be able to take this plunge, to write without borders, to follow these connections. but i've also been told that i have to have chapters to graduate. which makes me wonder if i just can't get my thoughts in order. or possibly i'm still mourning the note inside the front cover of hopscotch:
"i've got a problem with people. i just don't care for them, or i fall in love with them terribly. let me be a sentimentalist. despite the time, i started to love you. oxford, 1999."
maybe i should just knit a pair of socks and sit down and write.
my dissertation is becoming itself. i started talking about art and protest, but it quickly unraveled into a series of connections: protest - nation - embodiment - imagery - action - network - tourism - display - ubiquitous computing - politics - code - knitting. yes, knitting. i started by looking at knitting in terms of binary computer code (this is sadie plant's doing, in the book zeros and ones: digital women and the new technoculture). i started with the revolutionary knitters, but their own analyses didn't go far beyond the violent.non-violent dichotomy, this time couched in some pithy one-liners (this will have you in stitches, protesters needle the police, a close-knit community). i started to think that i had the wrong end of the needle.
but by following the links through knitting as a web of its own to protest on the internet, and then in the webs of the city, my dissertation came to be about the connections rather than the spaces between. no one, i think, was more suprised than me, particularly as i was the one getting wound up in it, and i was the one who eventually lost the thread - the neat 6 chapter outline that i handed in and defended. the pithy-ness comes with the territory, but ruth scheuing demonstrates that it's not without its own meaning.
in the end, well, not the end, somewhere in the middle, my dissertation became a web. it lost its chapters, it became a hypertext document, a map of itself. i lived in england briefly, and worked as an underpaid waitress in a café staffed entirely by those on their way to somewhere else. someone i loved (briefly) gave me julio cortàzar's book hopscotch as a going away present. written in 1963 it is a book with no beginning, no end, no middle. the reader, the back cover informs me, becomes the architect of the novel.
i want this for myself. i want to be able to take this plunge, to write without borders, to follow these connections. but i've also been told that i have to have chapters to graduate. which makes me wonder if i just can't get my thoughts in order. or possibly i'm still mourning the note inside the front cover of hopscotch:
"i've got a problem with people. i just don't care for them, or i fall in love with them terribly. let me be a sentimentalist. despite the time, i started to love you. oxford, 1999."
maybe i should just knit a pair of socks and sit down and write.
posted by myuglysweater at 2:23 PM
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