disOrder

mapping the museum

Anne Wysocki produced this map of A Passion for Art, a hypertext tour of the Barnes collection in Philadelphia.

This is a straighforward hierarchical structure. Although the reader/viewer can choose to enter one gallery over another, or examine the paintings there in any order, the information provided for each - artist, date, etc. - is the same, and there are no cross-references between paintings and galleries. The reader's choices in a distributed web are much more varied and offer very different experiences of the site, and both the reader's and writer's experiences expand again in a self-organizing web.