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Designed as a Java-based client-server system, dissemiNET is a curated and public participatory system conceived to elaborate a diaspora on the web. Creating a repository for personal and social memory, dissemiNET uses Internet technologies to give visual form to the transactions (deposits, retrievals, and loss) through which we experience memory. Disposed on a boundary between identity (i.e. national and personal) and its dispersal over the web, dissemiNET is conceived to trace connections between people in terms of "digi-texts," creating a cross-linked, communal storytelling space. First drawing parallels between diasporas and the dispersal of meaning over the web, dissemiNET, in response, provides spaces (lacunae) for people to recall and recollect, gathering there to re-tell stories about their own experiences with homelessness and dispersal. Over time, dissemiNET will become a collection of such stories of errancy.
The pool of stories may be harvested and read in relation to searcheable keywords or themes (words and phrases which the search engine may match or exclude). Key concepts are automatically indexed throughout the system, so users can pursue themes across the story space as it evolves. Video vignettes shuttle horizontally under the surface of the texts, and are reconfigured as themes shift, according to the viewer's movements between stories. When a keyword (theme) is selected, the system searches for and returns fragments of texts containing words that are visually or syntactically similar, and displays them on the "Crossroads interface," creating new crossroads/connections between stories.
DissemiNET was seeded with a set of testimonies collected by Pro Busqueda de Los Ninos; an organization which helps located children disappeared during El Salvador's 12 year civil war. Geert Lovink acts as guest editor of this second set of texts.
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