Hyperessays: Whimsical Research Tools That Approach Connection-Making as an Act of Authorship

Before starting his doctoral thesis, new-media artist Shaheer Tarar experimented with prototypes to code new academic writing tools to map references as they appeared in his thoughts. For the Web Residencies »Tools for Citation,« he wants to turn these prototypes into functional, web-based research tools and create whimsical research and writing interfaces, grounded in the foundational vision of hypertext: treating connection-making as an act of authorship. Two prototypical web-based tools will enable users to uncover lateral connections between texts and images in the public domain – while dynamically visualizing their path through the research process.

The first tool, Hyperessay, lets users collaborate with the public domain to generate essays. Starting with an input word, the program retrieves a random paragraph containing that word from the Internet Archive. Users can click on any word of interest, which retrieves a new paragraph containing it. This cycle repeats, functioning as a poetic research tool and chance operation engine.

The second tool, Spiral Getty, is a visual research interface inspired by Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. When users input a term, images sourced from the Internet Archive are arranged in a spiral. The pictures at its center are directly related to the search term, while those farther out are less relevant. Clicking an image regenerates the spiral with new associations.

Tarar’s web project will consist of a series of browser-based works that experiment with communal or »multiplayer« features to allow users to collaboratively dig through the Internet Archive.

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