Organising Principles
# Navigation
Material in this archive can be navigated in four main ways:
- Through the notes graph: by hovering over entries to see what else they ’link’ to, by clicking on any entry to jump straight to this.
- Through in-text hyperlinks: by following an associative path through entries as they link to another.
- Through the search bar: by imputting key words.
- Through tags: by browsing entries grouped by tags.
# Rationale
I start from a framing of dampness as a conduit condition, connecting seemingly distinct scales and materialities, revealing the relationality between a singular lived experience, and the social organisation of the city. Damp is a gradual problem, one which builds up over time and accrues higher levels of visibility. I view damp as something that makes visible the slow violence of long-term neglect, while making legible the links between this neglect and the social recomposition of urban space.
Following this conceptualisation of the function of damp within this research, I wanted to distil an archive methodology which reflected this. So, one which foregrounded making links and connections between entries visible to both the user, and myself whilst using it as a working research tool.
Owing to my experiences working in a major picture archive, I arrived with a few preformed beliefs about what I felt to be important characteristics of an archive. I was keen to avoid an archiving structure that more strictly dictates an order of exploration, and did not allow the consultation of two items in conjunction. Firstly and most obviously, this ruled out the book, which can rarely truly resist the imposition of an order through its pages, and without removable items, cannot allow for two items to be looked at side by side unless they happen to be paginated. Websites in general get around some of these obstacles; for instance, being able to open multiple tabs allows the possibility of viewing items in parallel. But more traditional sequential or hierarchical site structures also delineate order in a more didactic way.
With this in mind, I arrived at a web-linked, or matrix-modelled, site structure. Within this, I wanted to make visible exactly where these links were being made. While navigating a standard wiki, a user can click through pages in an associative manner, but don’t gain a real insight into how these connections ‘map’: what is linking to what, which entries are more referenced than others. Because of this, is also harder to move to something unlinked without exiting the entry you are viewing.
This presented some problems with tagging – entries were only connected on the graph where there was a direct link present. This meant it wasn’t possible to see how entries held similarity in theme or typology. I then added the catalogue page to fill this function, with the aim of moving towards developing the the notes-graph to be searchable or filterable.
The notes graph, which appears at the bottom of the home page, and the side of every entry, functions as this map. The graph displayed at the bottom of the home page is a ‘global’ map – it displays all entries and links. The graph displayed at the side of every entry is a ’local’ map – it displays all links within a range of 2 from the selected entry (all other entries directly linked to it, and all entries directly linked to these).
# Tagging system
The majority of the tags used in this archive group entries by typology and by form, rather than thematically. This is because most theme ‘clusters’, for instance, health or gentrification, have dedicated entries on these which serve as a means to link items directly when thematically related.