How did Wiki software shape this project?

Wikis lead to dispersion. Entries spread out over flat space: it’s easy to click around and feel disoriented. Decentering is staved off through the navigation bar on the right, which appears on any page and always points the way to ‘node’ pages: explanatory pages, author pages, even most popular pages. But there are also interesting ways in which the software itself provides order.

This version of Wiki, called Snip Snap, allows the use of a variety of simple macros (see list of possibilities). During the semester, we placed a ‘recently changed’ macro in the navigation column, allowing users to see a list of the most recently altered or added entries. This list has been replaced in RAP’s afterlife by a macro listing the 50 most viewed pages: certain poems have been inexorably crawling up this list, but some user home pages and a few popular student postings are hanging on.

The Wiki’s ‘search’ function (which we placed in the top right corner of any page) allows for very literal text-based searches that can nonetheless group entries in an interesting way. For example, try searching for ‘heart’.

Then there is the sometimes inscrutable coding that leads this Wiki to list certain entries under the "See also" heading at the bottom of any page. (There are some bugs in the program, and some of these computer-suggested links don't actually work properly.) Romanticists may be overfond of ghosts in machines, but it can be of interest to be led by the computer from Mary Robinson's The Haunted Beach to Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy, say - both stunned inventories of murder, come to think of it.

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