While discussing Shelley Jackson’s My Body – A Wunderkammer in class, I said that I would like to know for each page, how many other pages point to it, and that knowing that would illustrate something about the body parts most on Jackson’s mind, the body parts that she mentions most while discussing other parts. The more I thought about that, the more I felt like I had put my finger on something really interesting: a kind of text analysis that can only be done on hypertext literature. A lot of work has been done in the field of text analysis as well as visualizing text analysis (as Kai mentioned in class, Hanna Piotrowska’s project “If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler: Text & Data”). Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what ways visualizing hypertext analysis would differ from visualizing traditional text analysis?
For my project, I will perform some hypertext analysis on Wunderkammer and then design a visualization based on the analysis. As I said before, I am interested in how and how often the different pages connect to each other. By going through the website page by page and listing where the hyperlinks on each page take you, I will create a sort of adjacency matrix where the pages are nodes and adjacent nodes are the pages you can reach directly from a specific page (applying my computer science background here). With this, I will be able to draw a map of Wunderkammer’s internal logic, where each node is a page and edges between nodes represent a hyperlink connection, and node size many represent how many pages lead there.
There is a lot I can do visually that plays on the same ideas of Wunderkammer, like laying my graph out like a human body, mirroring the collection of links on the image that makes up the front cover of Wunderkammer. I will likely hand draw (or digitally hand draw) my visualization so that I have more control over the visual aspect of my piece and can try to capture the same feeling as the illustrations in Wunderkammer. I hope that my visualization will offer an additional way to understand Wunderkammer by diving into the mechanics that make it so unique, the web of interwoven stories and what they say about each other by being connected in the way they are.
As I said in class, this is a really cool idea. In a way, there’s a kind of “hystericizing” force at work in this project, as the psychoanalysts say, deranging and disordering the body’s organization by moving the organs around and revealing subterranean and subversive ways those organs “talk” to each other. Go forth and prosper: this is a great idea that’s nicely scaled, I think, to an end-of-term project.