Sam Hunting forwarded this to my attention.
From the homepage:
What is this about? This wiki is a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction.
Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means “stereotyped and trite.” In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them.
The wiki is called “TV Tropes” because TV is where we started. Over the course of a few years, our scope has crept out to include other media. Tropes transcend television. They reflect life. Since a lot of art, especially the popular arts, does its best to reflect life, tropes are likely to show up everywhere.
We are not a stuffy encyclopedic wiki. We’re a buttload more informal. We encourage breezy language and original thought. There Is No Such Thing As Notability, and no citations are needed. If your entry cannot gather any evidence by the Wiki Magic, it will just wither and die. Until then, though, it will be available through the Main Tropes Index.
I rather like the definition of trope as “devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as present in the audience members’ minds and expecations.” I would guess under some circumstances we could call those “subjects” which we can include in a topic map. And then, for example, map the occurrences of those subjects in TV shows, for example.
As the site points out, it is called TV Tropes because it started with TV, but tropes have a much larger range than TV.
Being aware of and able to invoke (favorable) tropes in the minds of your users is one part of selling your topic map solution.
TV Tropes is addictive!!!
There’s even a Linked Data wrapper of TV Tropes, in the way of Wikipedia – DBpedia, called of course DB Tropes.
http://skipforward.opendfki.de/wiki/DBTropes
It’s made by friends from DFKI Kaiserslautern. They even won a best poster award on it last year at EKAW in Lisbon.
Comment by aprilush — September 28, 2011 @ 4:59 am
I suppose there are worse addictions to have. 😉
Thanks for the DBTropes pointer!
Comment by Patrick Durusau — September 29, 2011 @ 4:06 am