I am discovering more and more of these—what I am calling ‘link maps’, perhaps there is another name—collections of links that act like an index or a topical guide to a large ‘body’ produced by Hypertexting. You might want to conflate these with wikis—most wikis do act like ‘link maps’—but I am specifically looking at a ‘link map’ and a ‘body’ as being seperate entities. Much like a map and the dungeon or landscape that it maps are separate.

A very similar word is ‘sitemap’—perhaps ‘external sitemap’ is a better term—but I tend to think of a ‘sitemap’ as a complete map, whereas a link map might be limited or contain duplicates (like an index). (For comparison, see the sitemap for Purdue’s writing guidelines or the SuperMemo sitemap as standard examples. Though, I’m not sure how these would differ from a ‘table of contents’. Or a ‘home page’—such as Paul Burgess’ home page, which is a directory to itself.)

Some of my collection:

• The Mother Horse Eyes index, which maps the stories, background, chronology created by Reddit user _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9. (Reddit wikis do function more like ‘link maps’ usually, because they are attached to an arbitrarily-shaped body of discussion.)

• The story index for Alice and Kev, the story of being homeless in The Sims 3. This one interests me because it is a completed blog that has been organized by the writer.

• The Mencius Moldbug topical archive and chronology. Please don’t make me comment on what ‘toxic’ or ‘enlightened’ substance might be in these papers—I have no idea. I am just looking at the layout and possible uses of the link map. (Related: Yvain’s posts on Less Wrong.)

• Index of users banned from the ‘slate star codex’ reddit.

• QAnon Map, it’s crazy to me this polished, almost military-grade skin over a 4Chan. I think this is sufficient proof that the underlying technology doesn’t matter—and it may even be a benefit to be plain, easy to copy-paste—when building a hypertext ‘body’.

• _why’s Estate, collected writings of a programmer who abandoned all of his work.

• Gwern’s home page is a topical guide to the site.

These all seem to follow the collapse or completion of a work—very few maps seem to be made while the ‘body’ is underway. I also wonder to what degree these misrepresent the ‘body’.

This document, however, isn’t a ‘link map’ because I am just linking to a bunch of separate ‘maps’ rather than focusing my links on a single ‘body’ of work.

I will add to this list over time, who knows where it’s going.