My Poor Little Egg Heart

"My Poor Little Egg Heart" was an online world, existing from December 2007 to December 2008. It was a map of human emotional content, broken down and categorized in the form of a universe that existed entirely based upon a lineage of language. Through a seemingly cold, analytical approach, I was able to reveal how words as data revealed their extreme interconnectivity and the true purposefulness that language is capable of communicating. Beneath the meaning of superficial definition exists an entire network of stories and origins that reinforce the emotions that individual words are capable of conveying.

To create this map, I selected a list of generalized words used to represent the contents of the heart. From there, I developed a system to map the words. Each word I looked up in the American Heritage Dictionary, where at the end of each definition would be the word's Indo-European word root. I would then research each root, charting its contextual history, the words that originated from it, as well as a list of roots to which it was related. I kept my system of word research rigid, only referring to words or other roots listed underneath the roots of my original words. Using this system, I was ultimately able to map a "pathway" for each word until all of them interconnected.

A few of the words I mapped:
Love
Hate
Egg
Omelette
Heart

From the charts I developed of each pathway, I created the “egg heart” world.  All provinces, creatures, and characters are named for the findings in my research.  Like their semantic origins, these entities interlink in multiple ways. The placement of each province (represented as a cracked shard on the surface on the egg shell) depended on the definitions adjacent to it. Links to worlds outside of the main egg heart also relied on this interconnected family of roots as the site expanded its potential to an exploration of a universe of words.

Stories, too, function in my interactive world.  I posted my prose in numerous places throughout this site, all of it written specifically for this world.  Stories functioned as explanations and insights to where else this world might lead and gave "My Poor Little Egg Heart" the potential of perpetual growth.

"My Poor Little Egg Heart" crashed in December 2008. Featured here are some snapshots of what it once was. While much of the original has been lost, I anticipate a version 2 of this site to blow version 1 out of the water.