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 .

Monday 16th January 2006 at 7pm

For the next assignment, take a story you have written or are about to write, and imagine you are inputting your story.

Detailed notes on the interface

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Attached is a first draft of the gothamberg database layout. As the “slides” are updated, so will the database.

The email will likely be the primary key for the user entity. I’ll begin writing relevant queries as things solidify…
Chuck

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.