Databases and Distributed Narratives: Resources and Examples

The following links provide a broad range of examples for those interested in both a general history of databases and information networks, and the role such technologies can play in the creation of fiction and other kinds of narratives.

Keep in mind that there's a fair amount of stuff in here that's only tangentially related to databases or distributed narratives per se -- but we feel that in the context of our readings, this extra material provides important context and flavour. Mmmm. And yes, that's flavour with a 'u'.

The list follows a general trajectory of antecedents --> early examples --> contemporary examples --> future directions.

Clay Shirky - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Relational database - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ODP - Open Directory Project

dmoz.org - Site Info from Alexa

wikipedia.org - Site Info from Alexa

delicious/tags/plautus

Google Image Labeler

cyoa · animations

ryanTree.jpg (JPEG Image, 500x435 pixels)

Electronic Literature Organization

YouTube - iPhone App: Bloom by Brian Eno & Peter Chilvers

jeff watson » Blog Archive » Tenori-on

Quasimondo : Incubator - Experiments, Sketches and Computational Craft by Mario Klingemann

Lev Manovich - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Work of Jonathan Harris

The Whale Hunt / A storytelling experiment / by Jonathan Harris

Twistori

ATLAS experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Many Eyes

Watch MGMT "Electric Feel"

Queneau sonnets

Grafik Dynamo!

Year Zero Case Study

I Love Bees - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

MIT Press Journals - The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning - Abstract

Scholarship and Social Media Aggregation @iMAP

One of the things I find most exciting about the iMAP program is how we're trying to reimagine scholarship in light of new technologies and practices. One aspect of this is exploring how social media can enable and extend the production of knowledge. After examining our research and creative practices, iMAP realized that, like most scholars, each of us was intermittently active on various sites and services across the Web.

Some of us used social bookmark services like Delicious; others blogged, either solo or in groups; most of us shared media like videos or images; and so on. The aggregate of all this constituted a massively distributed narrative telling the story of the program, the people in it, and the evolution of our research (as well as a great many other things).

Of course, so long as that narrative remained distributed, it was invisible -- and so we decided to do something about it. Over the summer, we built a website that aggregates XML/RSS feeds from all the services that iMAP students and faculty use -- from Twitter to Google Reader to blogs and social bookmarking sites. The result is a constant daily flow of posts, gathered from around the Web, reflecting the ongoing and evolving concerns of the iMAP program.

We think we're one of the first academic units to make use of social media aggregation; we're almost certain that we won't be the last. If you're intetested in implementing a similar system, check out this post on the iMAP site, or contact me.

UPDATE: Annoyingly, Blogger doesn't allow for single-author feeds; you can either grab a feed from the entire blog or just a single category, but not (at least as far as I can tell) for a single author. This makes aggregating out of Blogger kind of annoying. To work around this, I'm going to tag my posts with "remotedevice" (in addition to other content-specific labels) so that I can use the feed for that label to aggregate what I post here onto the iMAP site and my own site. If anyone knows of a better solution, please let me know!