Glossing the Text

Over the course of the 1990s pundits declared that the internet would open new paths for debate, discussion, and participatory democracy–heralding a new wave of community development, a revival of the do-it-yourself ethos of the punk movement, and the breakdown of repressive social and political boundaries.  The reality has turned out to be more mixed, seeing great developments balanced by the evolution of self-referential niche groups and the privatization and homogenization of the internet itself.

The latter trends deeply concerned the creators of Shiftspace, who viewed these developments as analogous to the closing of the commons in early modern era, and who believed that the dissemination of open-source data would preserve the communitarian openness of the internet and check the centralization of knowledge.  In development over the past couple of years, the program allows users to add layers of information to any webpage, creating glosses the provide more detail, context, and errata for the core provided by the page itself.  An icon alerts users to the presence of these metadata; an ongoing project will visualize the layers of information and histories of revision for use by artists and researchers.

Layering information has had a long history–think of the generations of scholarship in the Talmud, Eliot’s notes to “The Wasteland,” and the inter-relational systems of knowledge that emerged from the development of cross-indexing in the early modern period–but the Shiftspace program offers an interesting effort to combine glosses with social activism.  While providing new layers of interpretation and engaged scholarship in relation to the specific content of each annotated webpage, the metadata present a structural critique of of the internet as they open new possibilities for informed discussion.