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 February 20th, 7pm

Take a look through the new interface layout, especially the text used, and be picky about how to change it.

Detailed Notes on Interface 03

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New interface screens, in progress…

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.

Christiane created a hypertext version of Gothamberg using the 3D drawing by Johanna as an image map of the building. You click on each tableau and up pops the story associated with it. Hyperlinked into each story is another story that relates to it, so you can create a narrative that flows from one story to the next. At the bottom are the keywords from the original posting. However, these do not really help the narrative flow, they may just provide 'context' to the current story.As creating this 'narrative thread' between stories may prove impossible by computer intelligence alone, this lead to the idea that perhaps we can create a way for people to themselves link their stories to others. A little like Max Msp, which uses boxes and threads that you connect yourself.

People may want to choose a particular point in the building to add their story because their stories relate to those around them. By allowing them to physically do this with a threading system hardcodes their relationship to others. Those stories not linked may then 'float' separately as the building expands... so threading becomes a useful strategy to have a story read.

Perhaps as you read one story, you see the thread made up of the various spaces beaded together. Perhaps also, independently, stories that are read more often get darker, so perhaps 'trails' are visible, or destinations.

Finally, we thought about the way in which each story is represented. Maybe we have:

- a context glyph
- a ‘thread’ of associated spaces,
- the story
- the ‘thesaurus keywords’ or ‘associated texts’ (see below).
- Other? Time seemed irrelevant, as it seemed that jumping in hypertext creates its own time in the viewer

These may all be floating elements a little like Marc Napiers “Feed”, where each object can be sized and scaled by the reader, creating their own canvas.

Chuck picked out ideas, concepts or just categories of things that he found interesting. The stories then cluster around those ideas. It's interesting how these clusters throw your perception of each story, shifting them from their normalcy.We discussed the issue with keywords and their banality. They don't really let you in. However these 'ideas' are interesting, perhaps because they are more than one word. Compare also to textarc and the ‘association list’. Here the program does not search for individual words, but rather what words are grouped next to each other “mock-turtle” “king-queen” etc. This seemed a very promising way to understand what keywords might be.

An alternative approach would be to place keywords according to a 'thesaurus', so that at the bottom of each story you would have a semantic relationship of the keywords used.


Vivian collaged the various 3D representations on top of each other. Whereas the individual representations worked, something about these layerings, where the building is not totally exposed, proved more intriguing than the sum of the parts. Perhaps this is because the perception of an apartment building is often itself fluid. The map we have is neither totally spatial, or social, but an amalgamation of our knowledge of it.

Our assignment:
Make a sketch, diagram or other of the building Gothamberg. Include all the current apartments and other building spaces as defined in the texts. Do not add more than what has been described.

Left
Johanna created a series of tableaux that illustrate each story and tried to assemble them into a diagrammatic building.
Left middle
Warren:
This skeletal sketch is based on the idea of the Gothamberg being a vessel for stories, and like an organized painter’s storage space each piece can be stacked and stored (in their respective places) and the longer the painter paints or the older the building gets and more people live there (and the more people visit the Gothamberg on line or on-site) the more each space fills up with stories and if necessary certain areas, rooms, spaces could morph larger (I don’t show this in my diagram) but for some reason if there were a lot of elevator stories the elevator might have to be taller than the building itself or if apartment 11C has a lot more stories than say apt. 10C or 11B it may have to just be bigger because its dimension/scale is determined by the amount of story memory/activity it needs to hold as one accesses each story (which could stack as they were entered chronologically) the story unstuffs itself from it’s angled and skewed orientation and becomes legible in orientation and size (tip of the hat here to David Small but also to others including Marek’s own apartment project and my own 1983 typographical playbook called “I mean you know?” which scores the interior monologues of seven characters who all inhabit the same building) anyway, this here, I submit as a text as image based approach.
Right middle
Christiane assembled the stories into a structure that at first sight looks like a realistic cutaway of an apartment building. However, as you cast your eye around it you realize that the building cannot make sense. As more and more stories are added, the building will make it even harder for a 'real' 3D visualization. Drawing by John Klima.
Right
Vivian used a standard visualization software to place the various stories in relation to each other.

Our assignment:
1] Create a meta-relationship diagram (that tries to combine those below)
2] Pass two of the stories through the the meta-relationship diagram.

Notes:
- The assignment was considered really hard, and also the point of it was questioned. The goal is to discover ways to navigate the various stories on the site. Already there are several ways to navigate: by spatial proximity, by character, chronologically (when each story was written), by user-keywords, and by word analysis. However, the idea is create a way to read the texts so that they flow, rather like reading a novel, perhaps like a thematic structure that is uncovered as the novel is read. A suggestion was to have 'cartographers', whose job would be to create paths between stories. Also, it was pointed out that people would add there stories to others deliberately.
- Vivian showed popup books and explained the different way they worked. We are interested in these as a way to explore multi-dimensional spaces. More to follow.
- Warren discussed the idea of a book for Gothamberg. He showed us his latest book, Crossing the BLVD which combines images and texts into a series of individual and group narratives. We began to discuss ideas for such a 'hyperlink' book.
- We were introduced to Chuck Crow, who has a host of talents which include programming, music and writing, we hope he will continue with us.

Our assignment:1] Keywords
2] Relationship diagram of keywords
3] What does this make you think of? (optional)

Notes: We talked about 'keywords' and other ways to configure the text. However, we decided that keywords alone are not enough, and that we had to create ways to create relationships between keywords.