Fort Worth, Texas
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| City of Fort Worth | |||
 |
|||
|
|||
| Nickname: Cowtown | |||
| Motto: "Where the West Begins" | |||
 |
|||
Coordinates:  32°45′26.49″N 97°19′59.45″W / 32.7573583, -97.3331806 |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
| Country | United States | ||
| State | Texas | ||
| Counties | Tarrant, Denton | ||
| Government | |||
| - Mayor | Michael J. Moncrief | ||
| Area | |||
| - City | 298.9 sq mi (774.1 km²) | ||
| - Land | 292.5 sq mi (757.7 km²) | ||
| - Water | 6.3 sq mi (16.4 km²) | ||
| Elevation | 653 ft (216 m) | ||
| Population (2006)[1] | |||
| - City | 653,320 | ||
| - Density | 1,827.8/sq mi (705.7/km²) | ||
| - Metro | 6,003,967 | ||
| Time zone | CST (UTC-6) | ||
| - Summer (DST) | CDT (UTC-5) | ||
| Area code(s) | 682, 817 | ||
| FIPS code | 48-27000[2] | ||
| GNIS feature ID | 1380947[3] | ||
| Website: fortworthgov.org | |||
The New Panther City, Fort Worthless
I will rewrite Wikipedia entries and linked articles about Fort Worth, TX, to create a miniature, creative, autobiographical encyclopedia.
Growing up "Where the West Begins" places a great emotional burden on my childhood nostalgia. The spaces and locations I once haunted not too long ago bring up vivid, complex feelings. With my memory as my guide, I wish to rewrite Wikipedia- a Wiki psycho-geography writing performance if you will- and attach memories to a matter of fact encyclopedia. The TRS-80, famous gun fights, the Fort Worth Water Gardens, the Bass Family, Townes Van Zandt, the T-Bus system, and B-29 Bombers are all sown together with the same memory burdened thread of a growing dead-Texas-city.
The appropriation of an online, user generated encyclopedia for this project has multiple advantages. The supposedly non-biased point of view of each encyclopedia article equates to nothing more than a boring non-fiction writing project. Articles beg for a chance to come to life within a new writing style. Wikipedia articles already contain an inherent linking structure that gives the entries meaning because relation to one another. I can easily translate these links into a hypertext non-fiction, thus my story structure comes somewhat pre-defined. Finally, the online articles contain a variety of peripheral information I can utilize within my writing. Page histories, talk pages, external links, categories, lists, and pictures provide extra source content for my personal encyclopedia.
StorySpace's easy linking structure and navigation mirrors that of Wikipedia's. For this reason, a translation of the online Encyclopedia to the SSP environment seems feasible. For the most part, the Fort Worth article will serve as a central hub between my main lexias. From there, I will create StorySpace mini-lexias (e.g., state funding of Texas highways, Van Zant County, the old Dido cemetery, Texas oil money, Austin Singer-Songwriters) that tie into a more central lexia (e.g., Townes Van Zandt. Using software such as Omnipelagos.com, I can locate connections and links between Wikipedia articles that I can mirror within Storyspace, on top of which I will provide my own personal linking structure.
Taking this one step further, I will use the Processing environment to programmatically organize my writing and visuals. By storing the individual mini-lexias, lexias, and textually described pictures in a database, I can use a an algorithm (such as word frequency correlation between articles) to link information on the fly. In a similar vain to Andrea Krakty's "Soft Cinema," I wish to alter the structure of my encyclopedia for each viewing. Within this environment, I will display the run-time generated structure of the documents to the user in a more visually pleasing mapping structure than StorySpace's mapping system.
