This website tries to do something a little different. These are some notes on how, and why. It's a work in progress. (Ain’t we all.)
This site is inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of a ‘rhizome’. The site seeks to be a rhizome. (While also being useful. Or at least not useless.)
I did this because a CV or personal website requires the myth of a single trajectory of a life. And this is not how I have found my life unfolding.
“A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be’, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and…and…and…’.”Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
The whole body of work is held as one graph of records — people, projects, outputs, themes and the threads between them — and rendered three ways from that single source. The map settles it into one continuous, force-directed web: the form is the argument, entanglement rather than hierarchy, with no fixed centre. You make your way. It is not always easy. Such is life.
The Index typesets the same record as a document. (This is to be useful.) The record pages open a single entry up with covers, detail and downloads.
Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript — no framework, no build step, no server-side code, no trackers. One data file drives every view; the force layout is deterministic, so the web settles the same way each visit. Type is Newsreader and IBM Plex Mono (both open-licensed, self-hosted here, not called from a third party). Hosted on Netlify and served as static files.
This site sets no cookies, runs no advertising or social trackers, and makes no third-party requests for fonts or assets. For basic, aggregate visitor numbers it uses GoatCounter, an open-source counter that stores no personal data and sets no cookies.
A deliberately light, static site: a few hand-written files, no framework payload, images kept small, fonts subset by language so a reader only ever downloads the few they need. Lightness here isn't only performance — it sits with the natureculture strand of the work. You can check the footprint of any page on the live site with the calculators below.
The map is a visual, interactive thing, and a force-directed web is hard going for a screen reader or keyboard alone. So the Index is meant to be equal: the same records, set out in plain, linear, readable order, and printable to a CV-ready PDF. On the map, opens find and steps back. If anything here is awkward to use, tell me and I'll fix it.
Words and descriptions on this site are © Joshua McNamara, shared under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) — reuse and adapt them with credit, for non-commercial purposes. The works they describe — publications, films, the journal issues — carry their own rights; logos, cover images and any documents remain the property of their respective owners and appear here only to identify the work. The site records collaborators and contributors as a matter of accurate credit; if you'd like a mention corrected or removed, get in touch and I'll see to it.