Everyone who has lived in an apartment has a story to tell. Gothamberg is a place to read, interact and exchange stories of lives in apartment buildings. Together, these tales of unwanted sounds and smells, lobbies and bathrooms, laundry room gossip and unexpected favors form a single collective building, Gothamberg. The stories describe characters immersed in social dilemmas - guilt, responsibility, legalities and banality. Voyeuristic or chance encounters are concocted from the daily habits of the story makers. Their experiences form the elliptical threads of inhabitation, a mnemonic quality expressing something of the shared nature of dwelling.

This blog was set up to document the process by which Gothamberg was derived. These included meetings with a group of people, each meeting they would either write a story about Gothamberg, or analyze the stories and their relationship to eachother. The group also discussed the first interfaces .

When I first get a New Yorker, the first thing I do is look at the Table of Contents. Not only the title of a piece, but the sub-heading which tells you a little more about that story. We’ve been unhappy with the Gothamberg interface only showing stories as animated scrolls for a long time now. We had discussed ‘plumbing’, that is, various ways to connect stories to each other. So our solution was to recess the stories and highlight the ‘plumbing’, so creating a dynamic, interconnected index that links and hints at the stories and their connection to each other.

Interconnections can be:
A common phrase between stories
Author
Character
Uncommon phrases (to show the difference between stories)
Location of story (apartment, lobby, elevator, basement etc)

An image by Chernikov that captures our interests.

A few studies to show the building in 3D, which in the end we decided against.

First screenshot showing building, side of building, plumbiing and basement area. Sky responds to the time of day on host computer.

A brief look at plumbing as a way to connect stories together.

Illustrated manuscripts are an interesting example in which the text is combined with images.

New interface screens, in progress…

Some screens showing first layout.

People are asked to link to each other’s stories, so some stories form a narrative ‘web’ and others drift off on their own. The machine aids humans to create relationships.

Simple keywords were questioned, perhaps other forms like word pairings.
The machine creates relationships from the human forms.

Martin has a ‘cliche’ application, which he will present soon, that will parse all the stories looking for groups of similar words.

A scenario:
You enter and you see a ‘building’, an “n” dimensional structure. This can unfold depending on how you mouse/draag over.
Click to choose stories to read. The site unfolds like a pop-up book.

Special indications: Paths well traveled? Webs of stories? Recent stories?

You read a story, you see what other stories are linked to it, you can choose them, you can go to the main building, you can select a ‘pairing’.

At any time you can choose to add your story.
You enter the story title.
You type in your story.
You can link your story to others in the vicinity.

Other:

You can comment on any story.
You register by typing in a story.
Once registered, you can link a story to another.
You can choose characters and ‘flesh’ them out?
Stories that are read a lot get more prominent.
There is a coop board with coop members. When a coop board member leaves, they must nominate another in their place.
Stories with lots of swearing go to the blue area.

Some visual collages of what the building could look like..

Last we spoke, the idea of incorporating "trackback" for Gothamberg was brought up. However, in our case, instead of leaving comments on a particular story, the user might write a story in response, and these would be somehow linked. There's a great short definition up at wikipedia, but I'll just try and summarize below:

It can be described simply as: "When someone links to one of my posts, my post links back to them"

Basically, TrackBack is a mechanism used in a blog that shows a list of entries in other blogs that refer to a post on the first blog.

In other words, when someone writes a story (B) linking to another story (A), the original story (A) is notified that (B) has linked to it, and some type of TrackBack information is displayed on (A)'s site linking to the new story (B). This information is typically a link and excerpt from (B)'s post.

People are, in a sense, encouraged to link to other stories, since their post gets "advertised".

In Wordpress, for example, all links in a published post can be "pinged" when the article is published. This is done automatically, when a user submits the post.

Typically, the trackback information is displayed below a blog entry. In our case, we would not just dump out the connected stories in full text below...especially if, say, 50 stories TrackBack to a particular story. Perhaps some type of excerpt (as specified by the user when posting their story) from each TrackBack story can be displayed below the focused story. When a user finishes reading a story, they find excerpts of all stories related to the story they just finished and they select the one they wish to read next.

A story's popularity might dictate the ordering of these excerpts at the end of each story...

This would be an easy, coherent method for navigating the stories. The reader would experience Gothamberg as a huge story (loosely speaking), but the story would, of course, change radically depending on which story is read first and which TrackBack links are chosen from that point onward!

They'd be no requirements that a particular story be accessible (by any path of links) to another particular story. In other words, islands could co-exist, which would also be pretty cool...

Just some thoughts...


Started a page on popups in books, curtesy of Vivian. In talking about creating a multi-dimensional building, it seemed interesting to start an analysis of popups, as they transform 2D to 3D… and they also include time.

Martin and I got to talk about Cubism, and looked at how the use of gradients created a feeling of depth.