Ctrl+K

Introduction: Putting The “Me” Back in Memoir

Introduction: Putting The “Me” Back in Memoir#

A Discord message that says: I should use this corpus of my undergrad papers for something

It started with oversharing in a group chat. (And is that not the purest distillation of what goes on in a writing workshop, where a handful of my work first saw the light of day?)

Specifically, I had Wayback Machined myself to locate some old writing and uncovered a post — inspired by a McSweeney’s piece — where I shared the final sentences of papers I’d written for school. And just to be very clear right away, the whole reason this project can happen is because I keep everything.

I occupy this group chat with a small group of friends from my library science grad program. In the spirit of embarrassing myself to people I trust, I shared some of the funniest or weirdest final sentences with them. Like this one:

A Discord message that says: I can say one thing for sure, I didn't read this book. There is a screenshot of text below that says: DeLillo's simple tweaks, such as adding the hijackers as affected characters, incorporating art as a coping mechanism, and providing untrustworthy psychological stressors, illustrate in great detail the effects of "the culture of the easy edit" and how a few minute details can shake up an individual's views of a horrific event.

But then came the epiphany: I have all this stuff, so why not use it somehow? And maybe especially in a way that fulfills the requirements of my current digital humanities independent study?

A Discord message that says: At some point this semester I do have to produce a DH project. Screw graphic memoir, the future is digital memoir... this needs to be workshopped

This could be a section on its own — and maybe it will be someday — but I cannot express how much I truly thought “digital memoir” was already a thing in DH. So many illuminating projects out there analyze famous people’s writings or relationships through a DH lens that I just figured someone had probably already turned the camera around and examined their own works in this manner.

But when I thought about it more, I realized there’s not much external value in pouring time and resources into a personal project in those spaces that have time and resources to analyze, say, Francis Bacon’s social network. I’ve seen pieces like “My Decade in Google Searches” and “Tracking the Demise of My Marriage on Google Maps” that extract (or just represent) the relationship between technology and personality. But in spite of their emotional appeal, these are typically brief analyses, initial reactions to the tool itself or a representation of how a tool can appear “humanlike.” But since my independent study is self-guided to the point that I can declare what I’d like to get out of it and then just…define “digital memoir” for myself? Hello!

So here’s the very meta, very basic version of the “digital memoir” proposal I came up with: I’m using digital tools to explore and analyze my own collection of memoir-ish works in hopes that I learn something about, well, myself. Or how I choose to write about myself. Or how I interact with myself through words. Or, to put it in formal academic terms: I am putting the “me” back in “memoir.”