Aims and Scope
WonderCat is a relational database of human experiences with narrative.
The project is designed as an experimental alternative to reading lists (in courses) and recommendation algorithms (in the real world). It is intended primarily as a discovery tool, helping visitors find creative works that have been valuable to real readers.
The WonderCat editorial board has designed a review process for glossary terms that allows any member of WonderCat to contribute to our ever-expanding understanding of narrative in the world.
Site Design
This site is built with WordPress, using a child theme customized from Anders Noren‘s Vermeer theme. Custom post types, taxonomies, and field groups are created with ACF, front-end forms are created with Gravity Forms, workflows are managed with Gravity Flow, and the member dashboard has been customized with PublishPress Capabilities.
Shiny WonderCat is built with the R package Shiny and combines data from this site (cached every 10 minutes through the WordPress REST API) with Wikidata (cached every 10 minutes through the Wikibase REST API) to provide dynamic visualizations of the experiences in our database.
This site is hosted in reclaim cloud (the support team at reclaim has been incredibly generous as we have put it together!)
Publication Frequency
The database is changing constantly and glossaries are updated as new terms are submitted and reviewed by the editorial board.
Open Access Policy
WonderCat provides immediate open access to its content.
Licensing and Copyright
Copyright for all work published in WonderCat is retained by the authors and is licensed to WonderCat under a CC BY 4.0 International License. Members can update, download, or delete their experiences at any time.
Contact Us
For inquiries, please contact project lead, Mary Isbell.
Project Team
Mary Isbell
Mary is interested in the impact of technologies (from physical books to interactive digital resources) on the human experience of learning. She dreamed up WonderCat while writing Searching for Wonder: Teaching Literature with Student-Selected Texts. If given the opportunity, she will talk endlessly about open educational practices. She writes about teaching, technology, and nineteenth-century literature and culture on her blog.
Bill Quinn
Bill is an Instructional Technologist at Marist University where he also teaches literature and digital humanities. He contributes to WonderCat because it models an educational practice built on community building and mutual decision making.
Tom Woodward
Tom believes technology ought to be a humane dynamic medium. He appreciates the chance to work with the passionate people behind WonderCat in pursuit of that goal. He’s been sharing interesting (and boring) things on his blog since 2006.
Brian Daley
Brian is passionate about building software and digital tools for teaching and research. WonderCat offered enticing technical challenges and an incredible opportunity to work with a team of equally passionate educators.
Mike Benveniste
Mike’s research and teaching are driven by his belief that narrative is central to how people understand and aim to affect their world; it is a technology for causal speculation that is catalyzed by social exchange. He contributes to WonderCat because it aims to offer this vision and experience of the humanities to any interested learner. It is a community that fuses learning with genuine curiosity.
Our Sources
We’re always finding new ways to think about WonderCat, and tracking what we read and how it influences the design of WonderCat in this Zotero library.