The purpose of Sedimentation is to represent sediment around the site of Glen Canyon in its multitude of formulations, interactions, and movements. Sediment is often overlooked in the western cultural imaginary, perhaps because it is mundane, or because oftentimes it is out of sight, or operating at scales too small or too large to witness. Sedimentation hopes to provide a platform for viewers to engage with and better understand sediment, to trace its connections through the ecosystem, and to attune to its liveliness. Sedimentation is also an exploration in the process of storying a nonhuman, geologic subject.
Sedimentation should be accessible to a general audience and suitable for an academic audience. Sedimentation should also be generally accessible for a broad-ish political spectrum; while calls to action will be embedded at the end of the website, Sedimentation also primarily focuses on subjective stories of and specific interactions with sediment, and does not attempt to tie together these narratives under a singular unifying argument.
- Sedimentation does not seek to portray a damage narrative or use spectacles of sediment to foment a sense of a catastrophe which must quickly be reversed. Instead, Sedimentation aims to bring to the surface sediment’s ongoing agency in shaping the landscape around Glen Canyon. By doing so, Sedimentation hopes to draw viewers into a more attentive relationship with sediment, and perhaps with the other materials and forces sediment interacts with in the ecosystem as well. This directive is based on an understanding that inattention to the liveliness of the material world is what enabled—and continues to enable—harmful, short-sighted projects like the Glen Canyon Dam. By witnessing sediment in all its formulations and interactions, Sedimentation hopes not to spin a singular story, but rather allow viewers to explore and experience sediment themselves. The goal is only for viewers to leave the site with greater feeling for sediment’s rich and complicated status as a material agent in the world, specifically around the site of Glen Canyon.
- Through sediment, material lines may be drawn between ecosystem constituents, rendering the sociality of the landscape literally visible. For example, sediment may be traced from canyon wall to river water to algae host to fish gut back to water to airborne dust to riverside beach to adobe home to human lung. Projects like dams interfere with and reshape these connections. They also drown, sever, surveil, and control the stories that get told by and about these constituents. By showing sediment’s material accumulations and disappearances in relation to other constituents, Sedimentation aims to make evident the connections and interruptions in the landscape. This directive is inspired by Jen Rose Smith’s idea to “ask the mud, the pollen, the ice, the air bubbles, to be in conversation with one another about a shared experience or story of being alive. To not again cordon off and keep information from touching or only to touch if it serves the dominant narrative” (82).
- Sedimentation aims to convey sediment’s nature as something that is lively, disorienting, transitional, and indeterminate. Sediment can be part of the land, water, or air; it is not fixed in its form, it exceeds and disturbs cartographic boundaries, and is impossible to contain either physically or in representation. Sedimentation accepts sediment’s difference, untranslatability, unrepresentability, and attempts to maintain these characteristics across the website. This directive is inspired by the idea that in order to extract from a landscape and to erect colonial borders, the land must be rendered as fixed, separated into discrete elements, and inanimate. This potentially has legal implications–for laws of land ownership are based on exactly parceling out space–but when these spaces move, laws and measurements of land lose their ground.
- Sedimentation recognizes there is no universal sediment story–instead, like sediment itself, there are many particulate stories which arrive from a variety of places and take a variety of paths. These stories are not linear or hierarchical. Sediment’s story can only be approximated in the never-finished project of moving through a multitude of stories, each of which are specific in their interaction with sediment.
- Sedimentation seeks to ethically understand and represent Indigenous connections to Glen Canyon. Sedimentation, in its process, design, and rhetoric should reflect that the containment, disappearance, and disruption of sediment by colonial infrastructure projects similarly contained, disappeared, and disrupted Indigenous ways of living. It should at the same time reflect that sediment’s ongoing presence and liveliness in the land is mirrored by Indigenous communities’ perseverance and ongoing presence as well. Sedimentation strives to always practice consensual, non-extractive work and representation of Indigenous populations and knowledge.
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Landing page
The landing page is the first page visitors come to when they navigate to the site. This page serves to conjure the affective and sensorial atmosphere of sediment (always in motion, world-shaping, disorienting, uncontainable) and of the project (dynamic, interpretive rather than scientific, and exploratory) and includes only the project’s title, creators, and perhaps a short byline. Aside from (hopefully) catching viewer’s interest, by landing first on a page with more sensory information than factual, the landing page suggests that to know sediment requires a sensory, affective, and creative exploration and openness.
I take Devin’s suggestion to formulate the landing page so that the text is formed by the accumulation of silt particles, which eventually drain out of the text to fill in the outlines of a reservoir. By clicking the next button, the sediment drains from the reservoir and cascades to the next page, auto-scrolling to bring the viewers down with them. -
About/orientation page
The about/orientation page provides some orienting contextual information about sediment and the Colorado River meant to help situate viewers in the world of the site, and to prime viewers to cognitively bridge the gap between sediment as it is represented on the site and sediment as it actually exists in the world. This page also includes some brief language that helps guide viewers to navigating the site. -
Collections
Like sediment (and like the other subjects of the river), collection objects are dispersed non-linearly throughout the site. Collection objects might be seen metaphorically as sediment particles–each equally important as individuals, but also acting as part of a collective and intertwining ecosystem. Collection objects are photographs, essays, literature, video, audio, and art. Collection objects are generally organized into tributary groupings based on their subject matter (fish, atmosphere, infrastructure, etc.), but at times collection objects might share a subject, in which case they rest at the intersection of another tributary. -
Connective text
Connective text is original content that serves to link, contextualize, and orient viewers to the collection objects. Connective text is embedded between and around objects when necessary. -
Menu/directory
In the interest of optimizing user interface, a side menu allows users to navigate more linearly to each subject’s location, as well as the other pages on the site. This might be represented as geologic strata?! The menu/directory includes: -
About page
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Subjects
- Sediment
- Water
- Plants
- Fish
- Atmosphere
- Topography
- Infrastructure
- Indigenous relations
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All objects page
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Resources
- More reading
- Methodology
- Who we are
- More projects
- What to do
- Submit your sediment story
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All Objects Page
Repository/collection page for all objects. This is a pretty normal page as far as the site goes–more of a traditional archival collection site, with filters, search features, etc. This enables the site to be used as a collection database as well. This page is linked on the menu/directory, on the resources page, and perhaps also on each subject’s tributary page. -
Resources page
This page leads off the main site by linking to other CDIL projects, to calls for action, to further reading, to a creator bio, and to more scholarly writings about the development of the site and of sediment. The idea here is to acknowledge that the project is situated in and connected to a web of other scholarship, material politics, theory, and identity, and to encourage viewers to take action after they leave the site. -
*Stacked map
A stacked and animated map would create a more literal and data-driven representation of sediment and its intertwinement with other subjects. This is low priority at this point as it would require significantly more technology and data work, but might be completed in the fall. A stacked map would be able to literally show how sediment has accumulated/disappeared around Glen Canyon, and how these movements are tied to other changes in the ecosystem, which I think could be quite powerful, but I am marking it as low priority since it engages with/foregrounds a more enclosed, deterministic, and perhaps fatalistic thinking about the ecosystem. This page would be accessible as an object on tributary pages and linked in the menu.
Subjects are the entities that comprise the Glen Canyon ecosystem and interact with sediment. Each subject has its own “tributary page” of collected objects anchored around a narrative about that subject’s relation to sediment (as in Tender Spaces). Subjects include:
- Sediment
- Water
- Vegetation
- Fish and other animals
- Atmosphere (both affective and climatological)
- Topography
- Infrastructure
- Indigenous relations
Main Stem
The site architecture of Sedimentation is designed to mimic the fractaling paths of sediment. As the user scrolls down through the main part of the website (after scrolling down through the landing and about page), users follow a visual river of sediment, and encounter linked collection objects along the way. Connective text also appears here (like in the “becoming silt” section of the mock-up website) which is meant to create a brief, informative narrative of sediment surrounding and contextualizing the collection objects.
Tributaries
The sediment river bifurcates into a tributary when another subject (i.e. infrastructure, fish, plants) are introduced. These junctures are marked by a PNG representation of the subject, and users can click or scroll sideways along this tributary to visit the collection about that subject. Once the user has landed on tributary page, the sediment path then curves downwards so users once again scroll down the tributary path to view that subject’s collection. When an object shares two subjects, another bifurcation appears, and users may again scroll/click sideways to navigate to that subject’s tributary page. When a user makes it to the bottom of a tributary collection they are brought back to the main stem, but can always navigate back via a button.
Resources
At the bottom of the main stem, the sediment river empties out into the resources page, and splits into branches, each of which links to the following pages:
- More reading: Annotated bibliography of resources about sediment, digital humanities, geohumanities, anticolonial scholarship, etc. Meant to serve as a resource for others to get started on similar projects and/or learn more.
- Methodology: Links to Hannah’s academic writings on nonhuman narratives, geohumanities, etc. Meant to serve as a resource for others interested in theoretical methodology of this approach to storying the nonhuman.
- Who we are: Brief bio of creators, CDIL.
- More digital humanities projects: Links to other CDIL sites.
- What to do: Calls to action, perhaps including links to contact representatives, support for protection and coalition agencies
- Submit your sediment story: Users may submit a story about sediment, which will either be embedded in the appropriate tributary location or another tributary will be added to collect these.
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