The CreaTures Glossary is a set of tools for giving meaning to a lexicon of terms related to creative practice and transformational change. The Glossary includes games, a website, workshops, and other interactions that facilitate language as a social practice. It aims to give meaning to a lexicon that is particular to the field of creative practice and ecosocial transformation, but which might also work more broadly. Here, language is understood as belonging to no one in particular and to everyone at the same time. Anyone can participate.
Reference works like dictionaries, glossaries, and thesauri usually give an elite group of experts the authority to assign meanings to words, even though the language is a dynamic social thing. The Glossary thinks of language as belonging to no one in particular and to everyone at the same time. Anyone can participate, and there are several public invitations to do so.
The Glossary author, artist Amira Hanafi, brings a radical understanding of “common” to the project. They understand language, as part of the commons, as a site where displays of power are continuously produced and contested. Rather than produce fixed definitions, the Glossary distributes power to define language throughout the community or collective that interacts with it.
The Glossary tools – games, a website, workshops, and person-to-person interactions – capture the drama of everyday acts of linguistic co-creation. These tools are built to facilitate and document continuous linguistic interaction: Meaning becomes plural and fluid, and the lexicon is constantly changing. The tools are also metaphors, which enact some of the processes of change that the lexicon is meant to describe.
The website includes open-source, real-time text editors and games that request input from users who can contribute words or definitions, edit existing ones, or remove definitions entirely. Every contribution is meticulously documented via a real-time database, and users can witness each other making meaning simultaneously. Equally important, histories of these interactions remain freely accessible to any user on the site. The database feeds into the interconnected parts of the site, creating a hidden web of linguistic interaction that resembles real-life language acts. The website makes these interactions visible, which under other conditions might remain hidden.
The games that exist on the site are also played at workshops and other co-creative occasions. Examples include a Glossary workshop organised at the Uroboros 2021 festival as part of the CreaTures Feral track (May 2021), a workshop organised in the context of the CreaTures Plenary including researchers from the CreaTures team (September 2021), and a workshop with a group of experts in climate change and sustainability organized by RMIT Europe (November 2021). Three additional workshops took place in April 2022, inviting diverse public audiences including high school students. The Glossary project was also exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022).
The Glossary has multiple interactive functionalities:
Build vocabulary: A game played in workshops and on the website, adapted from the Rapid Word Collection method developed by linguist Ron Moe. Moe’s method is intended to assist language communities in capturing the words and meanings of their languages. It uses a series of semantic domains and related questions. This project utilizes the semantic domain of change and associated prompts, such as, “What is a word used to describe a big change?”
The game also generates questions that align with the research aims of the CreaTures project, about the practices, tools, feelings, and impacts associated with transformational change. The terms generated by the online game feed into the Playground feature of the site – a free space where users can organize words and create word communities, which later appear elsewhere on the site as ‘related terms.’ Users can click on words in the communities to navigate through the glossary. The user-generated vocabularies can also be read as short narratives.
Interview with a word: This game asks players to become words, to embody and speak as them. When played in person-to-person interaction, an interviewer asks the word questions, becoming a collaborator in making meaning. In digital play, the computer asks interview questions selected from an array of questions that were developed during interpersonal play.
Print the glossary: A function to allow users to produce a text version of the glossary, containing definitions as they exist on the site at a particular moment. The glossary is open, fluid and changeable, both in its definitions and in the set of terms that it defines.
Real-time collaborative text-editing: The website dynamically produces a real-time collaborative text editor for each term that is added to the platform. Users can see the existing definition for a term; they can also choose an ‘edit’ button that allows them to add to, change, or erase part or all of the existing definition. For users who are hesitant to disturb existing text, a simple input box asking, “What does this term mean to you?” offers a straightforward, additive way to make a contribution.
