'Reverse Hangman'

The post below is a literature review that I finished in November last year. It was used to document my current reading and ideas around my research topic.

The reason I have taken so long to post it, is because it doesn't function as a simple read-only document.

When you press a letter key on your keyboard (apologies mobile users, this won't work with you) the corresponding letter will disappear from the document. At least mostly. If it doesn't disappear completely then do it again. Sometimes it won't work at all to be honest. Sometimes it will freeze. But most of the time it completely removes that character from the page.

Go try.

I've attempted to make a programme that could delete itself in a particular way. Many thanks to my friends James Fawkes and Jack Anstey for helping me achieve it.

The process was driven by the question, 'how do we perform deletion?'

I wrote that question a while back, and still haven't answered it fully. I probably won't be able to.
The way the document below functions, is one attempt to explore it though.

Tangent: The way I used 'we' in the question troubled me. Who is 'we'? Was I hoping to speak on behalf of all civilisation? Western civilisation? British people? Plymouthians? My peers?
I could never assume to speak on behalf of anyone else, thus I saw it fit to make my programme interactive. I can't say how 'you' will interact with the document, but whilst exploring it yourself, you might observe how you delete it. 'How do we perform deletion?' became 'how can I facilitate an exploration of performing deletion?'.

The programme deletes in a (almost) precise and complete way. When a letter is pressed, it disappears. It can't be undone. You can't delete the deletion.
Except when you refresh the page. Which returns the document back to its original state and you must start again.

What does this mean? The ability to refresh everything and all of your deletion work is deleted, and all of my academic work is restored.

Does this mean that you are truly deleting? Or are you simply creating a different document, that looks very similar to my document, except without any W's? or S's? Or A's? And then when refresh is pressed, all of the hard work is deleted via restoration?

Is that the case with all digital documents perhaps? Once something is clicked or pressed or typed, can it ever be removed? If a code is typed in the internet but no one sees it does it ever exist. An impossible question I suppose.


The document used was chosen for a specific reason. It was my first piece written for my current degree and exists as a piece of work thats intention is to both let others know what I am attempting to store as my own knowledge as well as providing a handy reference point for myself, to look back on and remember what I know.
The document has only ever existed in a digital format. If that means anything. It also doesn't just exist on this blog. It's on www.jackanstey.co.uk/ConorMRes and my computer and my USB stick and on the university's sites. All roughly the same code. Aside from the deletion aspect of course.

This document was made for, and exists, in an academic context. Academia, by its nature, is about remembering.

Does this document, perchance, subvert that? Does it now (with the deletion aspect) function as more or less stable, or complete?

Food for thought. For me.


EDIT: I've figured out why pressing 'b' or 'r' makes it go a little haywire.
In order to input a break in between all of the paragraphs, there is a little bit of hidden code that looks like this: <br>
This stands for break.
When 'r' is pressed, that becomes <b> which makes everything bold!
When 'b' is pressed after that, it becomes <>, which then stops being a piece of invisible code, and is visible in the document.