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Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Rapid Fire Post 3: Branch

Branching out:

Branch, as websites go, is but a wee babe! It launched in January of this year. As such, it is not surprising that some of the promised features haven't reached their final incarnation yet. For example, the timeline doesn't appear to have anything entered. The number of contributors is impressive, considering the site is only nine-published-months old. The googlemaps image of where the contributors are from is neat--shows the global approach to the website in a visual fashion.

I wonder about two things. 1: are articles multi-listed under the Topic Clusters? This tab shows 8 headings, with a total of 130 articles listed. From a brief look, it appears that each article only gets one tag--the two articles in "Culture/Religion" do not appear in "Identity/Religion." But this question leads me to my second . . . 2: the introduction makes a statement "differs from wikipedia," remarking that Branch is peer reviewed, etc. HOWEVER! If we're making comparisons to the venerable wikipedia, Branch has a long way to go before it gets the intertextuality I expect from its introduction.

Granted, these articles are thesis driven--they have been written as academic, argumentation vehicles. Contrasted with the "just the facts, ma'am" approach of wikipedia. Branch is an online article database, that attempts to give intertextuality, instead of an online encyclopedia.

Branch states it has 200 promised articles that should find their way on the site in the next 2 years. For one things, 200 articles is great--but in Dr. Wisnicki's words, "I'm not impressed." 200 seems paltry compared to the hundreds of thousands of scanned documents some resource sites we've looked at claim to have. However, we're also looking at something completely different--if this were a brand new PRINT journal, planning to have a twice-yearly publication rate, with an average of MAYBE ten articles each edition--200 in two years is HUGE! (Forgive the excessive capitalization . . . )

The 2 years comment also makes me question whether or not Branch will continue asking for articles after 2014. Is this site designed to continue, or will it become a fixed digital artifact?

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<postscript>
Sorry I don't have any pop culture videos . . . I fail. I mean, I could have thrown up a Michelle Branch music video, like this one:

Or maybe some kind of "branch" illustration, like this one:

(white tree of Gondor, btw)

But mostly those felt out of place, and silly.
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