AMAZONS at the Moonspeaker

About This Edition

Circa 2000, Madrid Olivia Tennant presented a hypertext version of the Word Webs from the Wickedary as the final chapter of her interdisciplinary MA thesis completed at the Gallatin School at New York University. It is based on a database with CGI-generation of most pages. That is, each Word is an entry in the underlying database, associated with its own background image to indicate its Web. After selecting a Word to start from and loading that page, as the reader selects from additional cross-references identified in the original text and by Tennant, a series of bread crumb links is added to each generated page. Hence the reader creates their own travel path through the terms. It's an intriguing approach that balanced fair use and thesis scope requirements with Tennant's desire to create a submersive experience for the reader. Alas that the project did not continue, but I suspect the contradictions between Mary Daly's radical feminist analysis and critique with the "post-feminist" conceptualizations of Sadie Plant and Donna Haraway may have been too much for the project to bear.

Evidently this alternative approach to creating a hyperlink map of Daly's philosophy via the Wickedary cannot be a simple reproduction, and not just because of such matters as fair use. That acknowledged, it seemed to me that a challenge for Tennant's hyperlinked project is precisely that it was a chapter, and so the result was missing too much information to meet the needs of the people, especially the women, who might wish to browse the Wickedary and gather a sense of Daly's philosophy. The explanatory notes are summarized in Tennant's about and how-to pages for her site saved in the internet archive, but it is actually a serious disadvantage that the Preliminary and Appendicular Webs are not even hinted at. The headings as listed here provide many helpful places to start by presenting specific terms that Daly uses as part of the analysis and structure of the Word-Webs. These are the basis of the experimental Fore Word-Web and Ater Word-Web, while the other Experimental Webs present a new hyperlinked text.