Exhibition wiki for Worlds Away
Exhibition wiki for Worlds Away: “
In the research process for Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, Design Director and Curator Andrew Blauvelt uncovered many interesting words invented to describe suburbia. Andrew enlisted now-former Design Fellow Jayme Yen and Visual Arts Fellow Rachel Hooper to assist in the research for the exhibit, and to further research the lexicon of suburbia. To make the collecting of the terminology easier, we set up a private wiki for them to use.
The wiki of terms has transformed into the lexicon found in the Worlds Away exhibition catalog (soon to be found in the Walker Shop). We thought the lexicon would make a great resource, so it was decided to build it into a larger exhibition website.
Site URL: http://design.walkerart.org/worldsaway/
The exhibition website is still a wiki, and you can help enhance and add to the terms in the lexicon. Each entry in the lexicon consists of a definition, a section for images, and a google map. You can modify or enhance the definitions, or add new terms we might not know about. Images can be added to better describe the term. And map locations can also be submitted to give a satellite overview for terms that may best be seen from above (cloverleaf, for instance). We also added bios for all the artists in the exhibition, as well as a few sample essays and excerpts from other essays found in the catalog. Additionally, the selected videos from our YouTube competition can be found on the video section of the site.
The design of the site is drawn from the exhibition catalog design by Senior Designer Chad Kloepfer. The book uses different paper and ink colors in different sections to compartmentalize the types of content (essays, interviews, lexicon, and topics). The site also takes the book or paper metaphor and uses it as the navigation mechanism, allowing you to always see the index for the other sections of the site.
I wanted to enforce a rigours structure on the wiki, not let it grow out of hand, and only allow public edits in the lexicon section. Like our other wiki sites, this one is based on pmwiki, which allows for a rigorous permissions system. We’re using a few extensions, extended markup (for footnotes), Google Map API, NewPageBoxPlus, and DictIndex (for the lexicon list). Pmwiki is quite hackable, and the skin we constructed makes good use of that hackability. For the animation and accordion, I’m using my favorite javascript library, MooTools.
Please take some time to explore the site and enhance the lexicon of terms.
