Erin's Reflection on the Wiki as Medium

 Whenever I begin to prepare to write a paper on a novel, one of the first things I do after I decide on a topic is go back through the book and find the references relevant to my topic. When Kate and I decided that we were interested in researching the importance and significance of reading, writing, and language in Our Mutual Friend and The Way We Live Now the task of going back through two long novels littered with references to these events seemed like a task in itself. The wiki suggested itself to us as a solution to this problem, and the idea of an interactive catalogue appealed to me as a useful way to link references to one another, create character profiles, and allow themes to present themselves through the collection of references.

 After working with the wiki now for about 2 weeks, I have found the medium to be extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive, but also extremely productive and thought-provoking. Skimming through an 800 page novel and re-typing passages itself is no small task, but also learning to create with Wikia had a bit of a learning-curve. I have never created or worked on a wiki before, so learning what worked and what didn’t, as far as linking, typing, fonts, and formatting took me about a week to really learn. However, Wikia is very user-friendly, though it is somewhat limited in its formatting choices.

 Beyond the specifics of the technology, the medium has provided a way of easily accessing information, and moving from one character or theme to another, via a Table of Contents type list, through the textual references, or through the characters’ relationships with one another. To me, this has been the most enlightening part of the project so far. What makes the wiki’s cataloguing abilities different from just a list in a Word Processing document is what makes this project a fertile ground for drawing new conclusions. Because every textual reference is listed in more than one place, we can see how many references from the novels represent more than one theme, or involve more than one character. The wiki makes these relationships easier to see as a “big picture,” and easier to navigate and explore.

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