Riffing on the Paradigmatic Axis
I’ve been working on and off (more off than on) over the last few years on some projects that make use of Princeton’s WordNet Thesaurus. These projects exploit what Lev Manovich has called *the database logic:* the roles of paradigm and syntagm are reversed. Instead of dealing with words syntagmatically, one after another, as they combine together in sentences over time, databases (like thesauri) make it possible to deal with words as they relate conceptually, paradigmatically.
The projects playing with this idea include a page that selects a word (and its definitions) at random, one that generates sentencesrandomly using WordNet’s identification of word-types, and most recently, an attempt to combine its powers in a hypertext exploration of Joyce’s Ulysses and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. The attempt is explained here, the prototype is here.
