49,710
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
1 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Reassessing the Gravity's Rainbow Pynchon Wiki: a new research paradigm?

      Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisher
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Since the Against the Day Wiki launched in October 2006, the Pynchon Wiki collection has received over twenty thousand edits, making it one of the largest, dedicated literary reference Wikis. One can now view and add annotations to all seven of Pynchon's novels – only Slow Leaner and his non-fiction remain sans Wiki -, and a loose community of over four hundred contributors have done so. This paper will assess the importance of the Gravity's Rainbow Wiki in transforming understanding and interpretation through asking four different questions: does the Wiki count as a disruptive force in the Pynchon interpretive industry, who contributes to the Wiki, what types of contribution do they make, and how do they exploit the hypertextual features on offer through the MediaWiki package? I will suggest that the Pynchon Wiki does not fully depart from old media forms of interpretation and remains fragmented in both community, resembling a symphony of soloists, and potential connections. This is a version of Web 2.0 synthesizing both Darcy DiNucci's original dystopian vision of fragmentation and Tim O'Reilly's utopian idea of harnessing "collective intelligence".

          Related collections

          Most cited references43

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          The cathedral and the bazaar

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Book: not found

            What is web 2.0: design patterns and business models for the next generation of software

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: not found
              • Article: not found

              Gravity's Rainbow

                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Journal
                Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon
                Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon
                2044-4095
                2012
                : 1
                : 1
                Affiliations
                University of Winchester
                Article
                10.7766/orbit.v1.1.24
                056da199-63c6-4508-a6e0-a1ac3af2ae49
                Copyright © 2012, Simon Peter Rowberry

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

                History

                Literary studies,History
                Literary studies, History

                Comments

                Comment on this article