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Navigation
The project is presented as a subway system, with each memory a "station" and related stations strung together in "lines".Use the following icons at the top of the navigation section of each page:
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Below the icons is the minotaur picture and the name of the current station:
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Wiener |
Next are the line bars. These indicate which line(s) the current station is on. Clicking on the line's letter will take you to a summary of that line. The arrows indicate which, if any, stations are preceeding and next on that line.
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If more than one line bar is present, it means the current station is on more than one line. If that's the case, you can use it to make a transfer (correspondence) to the one of the other lines.
The lines are divided into two categories: linear and circular. Linear lines are those where the memories have a definite chronology. They are presented as a string of stations with a start and an end. If you keep going in one direction, you'll hit that end and be unable to go further. Circular lines have no chronology and are presented as a circle of stations in essentially random order. If you keep going in one direction on these lines, you'll end up back where you started.
Introduction
A long time ago, I realized that certain memories kept popping into my head at weird times. They were generally hazy snippets of something from childhood. Often, remembering one would trigger the remembrance of another. I began to wonder about them: how many are there? Why do they appear when they do? How are they linked? I also desired to preserve them. Thus, this project was born.
Evolution
I originally planned to link the memories together as they revealed themselves. In other words, if one memory commonly triggered another, I'd link the two together. By doing this I hoped to produce an actual map of my memories -- a maze of neural pathways. Doing that presented many problems, however, not only because the number of links was fairly small, but because the links often appeared nonsensical.My second plan was to link the different memories by common words. Using this method, every place the word "mom" or "mother" appeared, it would link to a prescribed or perhaps random memory related to my mother. This would certainly create enough links, but it would also be very difficult to navigate and would not give the reader enough of a big picture.
I finally settled on the current implementation: sets of linked memories that join at certain crucial nodes. Using this method, there are enough links and the reader can get an overview of the entire work and visit each memory systematically.
Inclusion/Exclusion
As the project progressed, I expanded the scope of the memories beyond the original, hazy pop-ups. Thus, you'll find memories from my teenage and adult years as well. I included these both because they're meaningful to me and because they help tie other memories together.You might also notice that not all characters get the same level of treatment. Thus, you'll find entire lines about my brother and my mother, but not about my sister or my father. That's not because I have no memories of them, but simply because I don't have many memories of them that have enough dramatic interest to warrant inclusion.
Design
The title, "Speak, Minotaur!", is a play on Nabokov's autobiography, "Speak, Memory!". The minotaur theme is taken from the original concept of the project as a maze.The linked memories and junctions suggested a subway to me, and so I modeled the navigation on that. The images, colors, and many of the icons are taken from the Paris Metro.
Chez Zeus:
Speak, Minotaur!:
Help Last modified: Wed May 18 14:43:21 2005 |
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