mayday

Hypertext centered on Mass Observation at the time of New Labor's rise to power, a contributory crowd-sourced work in HTML.

"This site went on-line at 05:00hrs (BST) May 1st 1998, unfolding over the day on an hourly basis until 04:00 hrs (BST) May 2nd. It presents selected extracts from a project, initiated by poet / publisher cris cheek as a nod to Mass Observation, which received a wide range of texts and images from the everyday on Mayday 97. We invited responses throughout Mayday 98, and they were uploaded as they came in.The site now stands as a writing, drawn from those details of their everyday lives that its contributors wished to register. Our responses to the accumulating mass of observations form part of what became, for us, a 'performance' of 'mayday'.....

'mayday' is not about one person snooping on their neighbour, or their community. But what details of their own everyday lives, people have a desire to register; what people make a 'note' of, what strikes them, what catches their attention. 'mayday' begins to map what was important to them, in that place and at that time, however mundane or ephemeral that may have been.

Contributions to 'mayday97' inevitably include a lot of reference to the excitements caused by that year's electoral 'sea-change' in Britain. We thought, one year on, some reconsideration was called for. This site is part of that process. It will remain on-line for the foreseeable future, hosted by var e-zine, at this URL. There might be other onward developments from this project, including book publication."

(Source: Authors' description on site)