webcomics and the importance of content aggregation

One of the joys of teaching a class on content management is the way that the concepts we discuss and work with have seeped deep into my brain, making it impossible to consume web content casually ever again. I write that half jokingly, but it’s amazing how much ICT 302 affects the way that I see the web, and how much my everyday encounters with the web shape my teaching in that class.

This morning, I had such an everyday encounter that I want to write down so that I can remember it for this fall semester—and perhaps many fall semesters to come! I have an ongoing SMS thread with a good friend that is largely filled up with jokes, memes, and other funny things that we see online. Today, my friend sent me a joke based on Star Wars: Episode III, and I was immediately reminded of a different Revenge of the Sith joke that John Kovalic made in a 2005 entry (i.e., just after the movie had come out) to his long-running webcomic Dork Tower. It is a very good, if very nerdy set of jokes poking fun at the movie, and while it is peripheral at best to the point I am making here, I include it below for the sake of completeness:

Anyway, on to the point: Since my friend and I were already on the topic of Revenge of the Sith jokes, I wanted to find this comic so that I could send it to him. The problem, though, is that I was remembering a nearly twenty-year old webcomic (that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen since then). I had a clear memory of the comic, but I had no idea how to find it. This is a problem of content aggregation, the way that content is grouped or organized so that people can find and consume it. Deane Barker has an excellent overview of content aggregation here—I’ve been using this book to guide ICT 302 for years, and I’m glad that it’s now freely available online.

My first effort at finding the particular Dork Tower comic was to use search—specifically, Kagi, which I’ve been trying out recently. As Barker points out in the chapter I linked to above, search is content aggregation, but it just plain wasn’t working for finding this strip. Search is overwhelmingly text based—not only that, but overwhelmingly based on text within web files. So, while I knew what search terms I needed to find the comic (“Star Wars”,“miniatures”,“high ground”,“lost the will to live”), those terms only exist within the .gif of the comic itself, not in the actual page that would be indexed by a search engine. This is a great example of how including a transcript would not only help with accessibility but also help people find content in the first place! I might still have found this comic through Kagi if other people had linked to or written about it, but that doesn’t appear to have been the case, so I struck out hard.

Kovalic uses a tag scheme on the Dork Tower website, and tags are a really common, really helpful form of content aggregation, so I thought for sure I’d be able to find it that way, too. I found tags for both star wars and miniatures and cycled through the entire archive for each tag, but no luck. The problem with a tag scheme is that you have to be consistent with it, and it looks like this particular comic might predate Kovalic’s use of tagging, so there was no way to find the comic through those tags, even though they should have helped me out.

I wound up relying on serial content aggregation to find the comic. That is, because the comics are organized in order of publication, I simply had to click my way through the archives over and over until I got to 2005, the year that Revenge of the Sith came out and the year that I was pretty sure the comic had been published in. I question whether that was a good use of my time for a single contribution to an SMS thread, but I am absurdly proud that I managed to find it after all.

None of this is a dig at Kovalic: Content aggregation is hard, I’m terrible at tagging, and what are the odds that someone is going to want to find a particular comic from nearly 20 years ago? It is going to make a great point of discussion when I cover content aggregation in ICT 302 this semester, though, and that makes the whole thing worth writing down so I don’t forget the story before then.

• macro
• Work
• ICT 302
• content aggregation
• Star Wars
• Dork Tower
• webcomics
• Revenge of the Sith
• John Kovalic
• Deane Barker
• Kagi