Within two weeks, the Digital Story Quilt for Hurricane Katrina Survivors and Family was up and running, borrowing from the development done on the kiosk software. The site, www.digitalstoryquilt.com was born. The web site allowed visitors to create a patch, selecting the options to choose the type of story - a memorial to a deceased one, a missing person report, or a personal story. The patch consisted of three layers: 1) the fabric layer, 2) the text or story layer and 3) a photo that visitors could upload to the site. Visitors to the site could search the digital story quilt patches to compose a quilt top built from their search criteria.

The digital story quilt project honors the quilt heritage by creating a technology that realizes the deconstructive hypertext envisioned by Stuart Moulthrop. This space, as described by Jacques Derrida, is one in which "assemblage" suggests a bringing-together of "a structure of an interlacing, a weaving, or a web, which would allow the different threads and different lines of sense or force to separate again, as well as being ready to bind others together" (qtd. in Landow, Hypertext 2.0, 35).

The digital story quilt project uses a condensed version of Gregory Ulmer's mystory as a writer/reader's patch on the digital quilt. The mystory is the whole cloth from which the patch is created, providing access to a decentered space that places history within individual's stories or "distributed" memories. The writer/reader first tears apart the whole cloth of their lives, seeking the experiences that provide an "emotional sting."

The mystory text begins with those moments that define the crisis in question, a turning point in the person's life (qtd. in Denzin 2002). Ulmer suggests that the mystory is a pedagogical genre he introduced in Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video (Routledge, 1989). He explains the form is his response to a suggestion "that if history had been invented in the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth, it would be quite different, reflecting a different science and a different aesthetic: not positivism but quantum relativity; not realism but surrealism" (Ulmer, Internet Invention 5). He suggests the following starting point:

The sting of memory locates the moment, the beginning. Once located, this moment is dramatically described, fashioned into a text to be performed. This moment is then surrounded by those cultural representations and voices that define the experience in question (qtd. in Denzin, 209).

These fragments of stories, images, quotes, sound bites, and video become the deconstructed substance of the writer/reader's patch in the digital quilt.

After creating their personal patch, writers/readers may then construct a quilt top, comprised of the patches of other individuals. Using a peer-to-peer network structure, the digital quilt interface "on the fly" pulls together individual patches from across a geographically dispersed network. The resulting composite may be dynamically manipulated by the writer/reader to create multiple arrangements of the quilt "faces."

The digital story quilt project uses narrative mapping as described by Stephen Mamber as a technology for poetic dwelling. Mamber speaks of narrative mapping as an attempt to represent visually events that unfold over time. A visual information space is constructed that provides a formulation of complex activities. The four purposes to narrative mapping are:

1. Representation - Maps can become that which they represent. They can stand in for and replace that which they seek to model. Maps have the ability to unpack, deconstruct, and resequence.
2. Analysis - Mapping clearly is interpretation, textual analysis. Maps must accommodate ambiguities and contradictions regarding temporal and spatial questions.
3. Information Space - To map narrative is to model an information space, or in part to construct an underlying database that is then visually represented.
4. Interface - Narrative can shift into its own interface. Fragments of narrative can provide new means of accessing the work (146).

Mamber describes five types of narrative mapping: 1) geographic, 2) temporal, 3) thematic or structured, 4) conjectural and 5) conceptual. The digital quilt allows for the manipulation of the patch as a free-form signifier along Mamber's five frames or others, animated by the writer/reader's desires:

1. Geographic - Using a global positioning system coordinate, a user may request patches from a specific community or region.
2. Temporal - Using dating systems embedded in the patch by its creator, a user may request patches that represent a particular chronology.
3. Thematic or structured - Users may view the quilt using the six faces of the mystory gem as relays to deeper content. The binding ties function allows the user to identify a signifier that searches the network for other patches with identical signifiers.
4. Conjectural - Users may randomly generate the quilt face, bringing the patches together to interpret a pattern.
5. Conceptual - Users may reflect on the arrangement and ideas of the patches, generating their own ideas.

Thus at the three layers of deconstructive hypertext space as described by Lawrence Lessig - the physical, the code, and the content layers - the digital story quilt fulfills Diane Greco's postfeminist research agenda.

Physical: At the physical layer, the digital story quilt is a peer-to-peer network that denies the centrality of an authority as in a database. Patches are composed from across the network as they are available, thus the universe of available patches is always expanding, but constrained by those which are made available at the time the writer/reader composes the digital quilt top. In its participatory action, the digital quilt allows anyone to create a patch, helping everyone to speak for themselves.

Code: At the code layer, the writer/reader is given the tools to create their own patch, compose the quilt top and inscribe meaning through the "threads" or constructed links. Additional tools in the digital quilt interface provide unique ways of manipulating the patches to "frame" the pieced quilt using different types of views. The digital quilt top is writer/reader defined, freely revisable and dialogic, continually questioning with an and/and/and logic that opens the way for possibilities and dismantles received categories.

Content: At the content layer, the digital story quilt is polyvocal, allowing a "communal authorship." Through the use of personal "artifacts" or the symbology of his or her culture, the writer/reader appropriates the tools of knowledge production for individual and community use. The writer/reader participates in a solitary or communal fashion in deconstructing and constructing multiple narratives within the interface.

The digital quilt foregrounds the multilayered nature of our experience. It appropriates the methodologies of the quilt - fragmentation, condensation, juxtaposition, and improvisation - to endow quotidian, pedestrian narratives with the power to virally infect discourses of power. It uses the politics of displacement - shifting the disciplining gaze - to allow us to interrogate questions of self, identity, history and memory.

Designed to be nonlinear, insertive, layered, disconnected, nonorganized or categorized, defamiliarizing, disruptive, scalable and complex, the rhetorical style of the quilt is refashioned as a hyperrhetoric for a deconstructive hypertextual space.