Wow, so where do I even start to explain this story? At the very beginning, I suppose, at the very beginning...

All my life, I've always been very interested in the topic of presenting traditional things in new ways; so back when I was a photographer, that meant photography, and then when I was a creative writer and self-publisher, that meant creative writing and self-publishing. And now that I'm an arts administrator, and am reading a lot more traditional history as part of my job, I thought it'd be interesting to start exploring new and exciting and cutting-edge ways to present even this, even boring old stuffy traditional history and traditional academic-style research. And then this is all combined with yet another thing going on in my life these days, which is that I'm constantly in the process of trying to come up with yet another full-length publishing project to create and release through my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography; as regular readers know, I release such publications for free there once every month or two, simply to maintain as big an audience over there as possible, plus to get X amount of people each time to say at their blogs, "Hey, wow, look at this cool freaky thing Pettus has yet again done," thus giving the entire center some free publicity, and with a message more powerful than any advertisement could convey. And then this also all doubles as a way of reinforcing all the time what I sell as my main strength during the day as a freelancer -- that I am a highly attuned, highly original expert on the future of the arts and entertainment industries, especially when it comes to emergent technologies, and that your company should hire me to give you expert advice as it pertains to all this stuff, and how you can incorporate less complicated versions of these projects into your own commercial endeavors. (I counsel both big corporate clients and small non-profits; seriously, drop me a line if you're interested. The first consultation is always free, my guarantee.)

So, one of the things I've been doing at CCLaP because of all this has been to take on a big major historical subject two or three times each year, just as a fun personal project concerning a subject I've always wanted to know more about; last winter, for example, it was Gilbert & Sullivan, while next summer will be India. And the way I do this is just like any other amateur history buff would; I simply sit around every weekend and read a little bit more about the subject at hand, every weekend for four or six months until I feel like I finally have a sophisticated understanding of that subject. And to be frank, most of this is done through what has to be my number-one destination on the internet besides my email account, which is Wikipedia; and every time I'm there doing one of these Saturday afternoons of research, I keep thinking of what a bizarrely modern and pleasurable thing it is to do amateur history-buff-style research at Wikipedia, of how a Saturday afternoon there reading up on a subject is such a different thing than a Saturday afternoon of reading through a paper encyclopedia, which I also used to do when I was a kid because I am a nerdy moron. And the difference, of course, is the hyperlinks, which in terms of pure ideological innovations is perhaps the most profound thing our entire internet age has so far created; because as anyone who's ever done an afternoon or late-night of web-surfing can tell you, the causal and magical connections we make in our heads through ideologically-linked reading is just so much more powerful a thing than any static collection of paper pages, no matter what order those particular pages were first put in. And that's because presenting such information in a hyperlinked way is like tearing off the spine of such books and throwing all the loose sheets into a cardboard box, yet attaching ultra-smart little robots to each loose page, so that one can pick up any of the sheets therein and say to its bot, "Go fetch me every other page in this giant box that's somehow related to yours, when it comes to this particular tiny little criteria that I've randomly picked," and have this bot return those pages instantaneously; and that verges on science-fiction, frankly, and becomes at the end just such a more profound way for human beings to learn academically about a subject, to just be able to intuitively follow a line of thought from related reference to related reference to related reference, as far as one wants until one's ready to backtrack again, and start going down yet another specific side-alley of history.

But see, once you decide that you want to put together some kind of cool project that takes advantage of the stream-of-consciousness that comes with hyperlink-based historical research, you immediately run into a problem; just how do you collect this "cloud" of not only the information you gathered but how it hypertextually relates, delivering the scattershot results of an afternoon of Wikipedia-browsing in a recordable way that others can exactly follow later in the same order you came across it? For example, I recently decided on the next research project I'm going to take on, which I definitely plan on doing a full-length book concerning for eventual free download at CCLaP; it's the most general subject I've taken on yet as an amateur historian, in fact, the entire subject of "The 19th Century," taken on deliberately as an extra-special challenge to myself, in that I feel like I've finally become a good enough amateur historian to try taking on a big huge subject like this. And given these global times we live in, and this new theory of historical research that says we should look at the events of a time period from around the world at once to truly understand that period, I've decided for the first time in my life to delve into my own research project from all global aspects at once: I'm not only reading about the three American waves of history that happened in the 1800s (the "nation-building" years, the Civil War, and the "Manifest Destiny" years), but also the British Empire at the same time, as manifested through the Regency and Victorian periods; plus the Napoleanic Age in France; plus the rise of the Tsarist Russian Empire to the global stage; plus the efforts for self-rule in such "white colonies" as Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand; plus the British Raj in India; plus the massive and chaotic "Scramble for Africa" among all the world's "industrial nations;" plus the simultaneous declines of the Ottoman Empire, Holy Roman Empire, Spanish Empire, Portuguese Empire and Mughal Empire; plus the rise of the Barbary pirates; plus the Edo and Meiji periods in Japan; plus the Qing Dynasty in China; plus the Haitian Revolution; plus any other major national movements on the planet in the 1800s I come across in my research. Whew!

So at Wikipedia, then, if you start your first day of such research on the page labeled "The 19th Century," you'll find direct links to all the major global epochs and republics and empires and whatnot I just mentioned there on that main page; so what I did today, for example, on my very first official day of work on this project, was go to only one of these major split-off pages, the one for the British Empire, where over the course of around three hours and several beers I ended up reading from start to finish a total of 43 Wikipedia entries. And of those 43 entries I read on this particular Saturday afternoon, 30 of them are what I consider "complete" and that I never need to come back to again (shown in either black or gray in all of today's multi-color screenshots); five of them refer to major events that are arguably more important to other societies than to the British Empire (shown in red in these screenshots), meaning I should wait until I'm doing my major research in those parts of the world before starting to click through all the exotic links seen; and eight of them I imagine will remain only sub-topics to the main one of the British Empire, but just were too long and detailed of entries for me to finish on this particular Saturday afternoon (shown in all these screenshots in blue). So if I were to record my research this afternoon in a traditional hierarchal list in a traditional word processor, for example, the above screenshot is how it might come out; and while that's decent for at least recording all the Wikipedia pages I ended up going to this afternoon, and for being able to share those URLs with other people afterwards, it's lousy at conveying to others the beautifully messy way these subjects are all connected through hyperlinks at the Wikipedia site itself. And like I said, that's the main point I want to get across; that a major research project done at Wikipedia is ultimately a more complex and more rewarding thing than simply sitting down with paper books, in that the links inspire and teach us to think of the subjects in newly complex, interrelated ways.

(Click image for larger version)

So now take this second screenshot, created through a freeware program called Pathway, which is a pretty cool little program indeed; it is partly a Wikipedia-only web browser, partly a mind-mapping graphic-design program, so that every Wikipedia page you go to gets automatically added in real time to a giant visual map, along with lines showing how you got from one page to the next. Freaking brilliant! Do you know how long I've been waiting for a program that would do this, that would record the exact pathways of causal connections I take at Wikipedia on any given Saturday afternoon? Like I said, this is half the genius of doing historical research at Wikipedia in the first place, is because you get to follow an insanely intuitive order to your reading, not one arbitrarily based on dry historical dates or the random whims of some unknown professor; I love that this program so easily follows and tracks this order of reading I do on any given day, without me having to stop and laboriously track it all myself, including the loads of unvisited sublinks for any given page that I'm constantly having to come back to under such a system. So what Pathway does, then, is simply plop these graphic elements on a giant blank space as I web-surf, each of them evenly spaced from one to the next; then when I'm done with my actual surfing, I can go back to the white space and rearrange these icons with my mouse in any way I wish, like for example the pretty little cloud you see here. And this is great, because I can even arrange my unfinished research in an intuitive way if I want; like seen here, for example, where the farther out on the edge on the map I placed any particular topic, the more unrecorded side-links are left to explore concerning that topic. And that way on subsequent Saturdays this year, I have an ultra-easy way to determine where to start on any given afternoon, by simply glancing around the edge of that map and picking any of the subjects found there.

(Click image for larger version)

Of course, this being freeware, Pathway also has a number of serious drawbacks that you can do nothing about; as you saw in the previous screenshot, for example, there's no way to change the color or size of each particular entry being tracked, no way to format the text to reflect yet more sophisticated information. So to do that, then, I moved to yet another piece of freeware called FreeMind, a much more powerful mind-mapping application but that unfortunately does not have the automatic Wikipedia page-tracking of Pathway. And as you can see in this screenshot, when I go to the trouble of redoing the mind-map through FreeMind, I come up with a document both prettier and more useful; in this case, a map with better titles, once again displaying the contextual colors of my original text document (red: links away to other coming major maps; blue: British Empire sub-topics with still more links to come; black: "closed" entries, completely read and with no more links to check out), plus with the opportunity to draw tangential arrows across the entire diagram if I want, plus with the chance to make the text of each entry smaller or larger depending on how important I think it is to the overall development of the 19th Century. And like I said, this would be perfect if FreeMind simply tracked your Wikipedia-browsing automatically like Pathway does; and Pathway would be perfect if it simply offered the kind of formatting sophistication that FreeMind does. And that's simply what sometimes comes in the world of freeware, is a whole series of applications that each are nearly perfect but none of them exactly so.

(Oh, and a digression, as I sit here looking at the diagrams once again; remember that the connections being shown in them are not just arbitrarily chosen by me for sociological or historical reasons, but literally reflect the order I found the articles when doing random fuzzy-mind web-browsing over at Wikipedia. This is an integral part of the process, I'm convinced, to making such a multimedia, hyperlinked academic-style research project actually worthwhile, is to make sure to record the exact order that these links were inspired, of which subjects led you to being interested in which other subjects, which with any luck will be an order that will deeply and naturally resonate with many others as well.)

So here's the plan for now when it comes to all this, and you'll of course have to drop me a line and let me know what you think, let me know if you'd voluntarily slip CCLaP five or ten bucks afterwards if I actually did manage to get such a project finished and online for others to check out for free...

For the next six months or so, keep logging in a whole series of these three-hour afternoon Wikipedia sessions, whenever I have the free time to put another one in, hopefully adding up to an insane amount of articles eventually read about the 19th Century by the end, maybe close to a thousand altogether if I'm lucky, concerning subjects spread around the world and spanning literally the year 1800 to the year 1900. Then when I'm ready to present my results, post both my collected Pathway file on the subject and my collected FreeMind one online; it's easy to do both, after all, to post a file from both these applications online, so that others with these applications can download them and start using them directly. And not only are both of these applications free for all to use, but in both cases the files' "nodes" even contain active links to each Wikipedia entry being referenced, so that when using such mind-maps all you have to do is click on a title to get shuttled automatically to the article being mentioned. And that will officially count as the "coolest" way to follow along with the research project I've done, the option that most mirrors what I wanted to try to do with the project in the first place, the option I'll most encourage people to take on themselves, by downloading one or another of these freeware programs to their own computer, and then downloading the appropriate file.

But of course as we all know, most people won't want to go to the trouble of doing that; so I'll also prepare a traditional narrative book as well, where I take a plethora of screenshots of these mind-maps, and lay out the threaded lines of thought in as straightahead a way as can be done. And that'll be offered up like all of CCLaP's minor books are offered up, as a free download in PDF form for either American or European laserprinters, as well as a version for Sony Readers, along with a link to CCLaP's Paypal account for anyone who'd like to make a donation afterwards. So basically I would bundle all this up together on one page, an "online headquarters" just like I do with all of CCLaP's books; and hopefully this would all be enough to make a lot of people go, "Wow, okay, I get it, it's an entirely new way to even approach the idea of academic research, and of tracking that research, and of doing so-called 'dilettante' research as a weekend hobby on one's spare time." And like I said, would also hopefully help raise how my skills are perceived in the eyes of a growing amount of people, which would hopefully increase the amount of freelance consultation and futurist work I'm getting on any given day regarding these skills. Because seriously, I need to start making some significant money this year for the first time in a long time, or else I'm going to...I don't know, die of malnutrition or get hit by a car or some ridiculous pointless thing like that.

So...what? Does this sound like a plan for 2009? An interesting way to present a thousand Wikipedia entries about a given massive general subject? An entirely new way to even think of the idea of intuitive, productive information-gathering? I don't know how everyone else will react, frankly; but at least for now it seems like an interesting idea to me, if nothing else a project that's helping me in a personal way profoundly understand the 19th Century with a multifaceted complexity I never did before. I guess that's the real proof in the pudding, that such a style of research is at least working profoundly well for me; and hey, as long as I'm doing it this way, I figure I might as well record it, so that I can share the process in the order I did it with others, in the hope that it'll help them make more sense of an ultra-complicated subject too. As always, it's a work in progress; and as always, I'm sure I'll be posting yet another update concerning it all before too terribly long.