Looking Back: The Process
I started with some simple voyant analysis:
These got me going and gave me some direction as to what to look for in the book before i had actually read it. Terms Radio didnt help me as much for this novel as it did for Dracula, but from the terms list i noticed two interesting things: the word 'Nation' was used very frequently and was the most used word with substance (words other than character names, "said", '"and", etc.) and the word "socialism" is never mentioned. That struck me because Bellamy's Utopia is described by many as a "socialist Utopia" so i wondered why it didn't show up in book, and the search was on. I found that Nation and nationalism were the words preferred by Bellamy, most likely because his Utopia involved a real sense of pride and patriotism to one's country, or the Nation.
So i was running off with Voyant, but i also had my collaborations with Joe and Dan, and those are what really got me thinking about my novel in the way i did for the project. Comparing our novels, the people and societies in them, and finding connections between is what lead me to consider the intricacies of the societies present in my novel, and how distinctions between people (individuals) were made. Without Joe discussing the Eloi and the Morlocks and without Dan discussing distinctions between humans and beasts i might not have gotten to finding the detailed distinctions, the particular things that differentiated these societies, in my own novel. The whole brainstorming process was very thought-inducing for me.
So next i moved to differentiating between the societies, but also drawing connection between them at the same time. This is where ideament came in. The app allowed me to get some of my ideas outlining the societies into a space, connect them, and rearrange them in any way i wanted.
I wanted my entire project to be like this for the viewer, a space where i had artifacts and signifiers that people could move around freely and make connections on their own, but that wasn't possible unfortunately. I did find that once i had put my information in my flow chart and connected some of it i could let ideament rearrange it. I did this quite a bit, connecting, reconnecting, disconnecting, scrambling, and from it I began to see the more solid relations, the connections i could build my project on. And from that we came here, to Scalar, where i struggled greatly but tinkered around and managed to build my project.
Hopefully this "exhibit" idea works, and i do want to about one choice i made in making it. Orignianlly i imagined a space where it would be possible for the viewer to make the connections on their, unguided without a voice telling what to see and how to connect things. Unfortunately this wasn't possible, but i wanted something like that to exist. So i took a calculated risk in not explaining the connection to the videos directly. I wanted the 'viewer' to watch them and make the connections on their own and hopefully, in a way, annotate that connection in their minds and actually think why it was there. I hear the term "participatory reader" a lot, and i wanted the viewer to 'participate' in making their own connections.
This page has paths:
- Final Thoughts on Looking Backward Evan Ratermann
