An idea I've had

Lately I've been kicking around some ideas to do at student symposium this coming spring. I definitely want to do something (especially considering the amount of talking I've been engaged in lately about going into academia). The problem is, I can't think of any particular author or artist I could consider myself an expert on that no one else has. I mean, I know Kerouac almost by heart, but so does every asshole. No one wants to see a symposium project on that. I was debating doing one on Hitchens, who is not a fiction writer, so I don't know about that. None of my professors have asked me to do anything, so I assume none of them are that interested in what I have to say. Whatever.

An option for the symposium, and for English honors in general, is to write some sort of short story, but I gather that not many people do this because the professors are intensely critical of fiction work. I think I could do it though. I was recently reminded of John Barth's great short story "Click," which deals very explicitly with the idea of "hypertextuality," wherein all works of science or literature could be connected to each other via hypertext links, not unlike the internet itself. "Click" was written in 1997, but when I read it a few months back I was shocked at how prescient it seemed. Whether he was presenting an absolutely new way of thinking or a new way of literature is debatable, but in these days of Web 2.0, it seems relevant, at least considering what I know.

"Click" offers a lot of interesting new perspectives on the craft of reading, but in the end, it's just basic text made to fool us into thinking that this "hypertextuality" goes beyond the printed page. My idea was to take Barth's ideas (which I don't think are necessarily his) and elaborate it into a symposium project wherein I would create a wikistory. To elaborate, I thought that I would start with a base text, perhaps only a few paragraphs long, that would contain links to other sections of the wiki, to be read at the readers' own discretion. These separate pages or articles would contain some sort of poem or prose, or even a picture, that would complement or illuminate what I was saying on the original page. Some of these pages would branch out further into other pages--the end result would add up to something along 20 pages of actual material, but the reader is free to look at it in several different ways.

My biggest problem is that I don't know how to make a wiki. My friend Karl is a very strong proponent of wikis, so maybe I will enlist him to help. This may be way over my head though. It seems like a good idea, but what about the actual plot? What would I write about? It's important that my subject matter work as a linear piece of literature as well as a pedagogical exercise, because otherwise I could write any cryptic bullshit I wanted, and I am not the kind of person that likes to do that.

Anyway it's just an idea. I probably won't go through with it. It's better than most of my ideas though.