In the fall of ’98, Diana Slattery enticed her colleagues at the Academy of Electronic Media (her full time day job) to collaborate on a graduate class project to make some applications with which one could play with Glide visual language, and to construct an aesthetic website to hold the various aspects of the project. Slattery provided the story and language, the information design, much of the graphics and animations.

The original interactive pieces were 1) an animated full lexicon of glyph meanings that essentially illustrates the way that meanings develop in a branching fashion, “metaphoring” outward from a core set of meanings, and 2) the first version of the Collabyrinth.  The Collabyrinth centers on a glyph editor in which one can make Glide mazes and change various properties of the “writing.”  It includes the ability to animate the glyphs, as one of the essential characteristics of Glide is that it is dynamic—glyphs morph into one another as one of the means of making meaning, adding a time/transformational dimension to language only possible in a digital medium.  It’s called the Collabyrinth because one can also use it with others in real time on line, making and discussing constructions..