Groundhogs in the Source Code - Navigation as Cross-channel Sense-making

Of old, narrative and storytelling were used to weave useful pieces of information into stories that could be handed down orally, generation after generation. These were usually stories of traveling, quests for an elsewhere. In the past hundred years, the maturing of mechanical reproduction of music, images, and movement, has changed this seamless narrative immersion into self-conscious reflection, physical struggles into psychological tensions, and traveling the world into traveling the mind and soul.

Through a series of examples, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), camp musical videoclips (1980s), early videogames such as “The Secret of Monkey Island” (1990), and movies such as “Groundhog Day” (1993), this presentation will argue that as ‘digital’ matures and becomes one again with ‘physical’, immersion in cross-channel experiences will be achieved through non-literal, abstract navigational grammars and place-making, and the language we will use, the pervasive sense-making layer that will weave experiences into stories once more, will be that of information architecture.