The Corpus#
This project is based on a collection of works I wrote that I feel constitute “memoir.” I’ve done a great deal of personal writing, but when it came to zeroing in on the right feel for this corpus, for this project, I found the most useful way I eliminated potential works was if they felt too blog-like. To put it in insultingly simple terms, a memoir’s takeaways should feel earned, rather than be wrapped up neatly at the end as a blog post’s call to action might. “Is this a slow burn[1] or am I holding the audience’s hand?” was a useful shorthand version that cut my corpus down from 50-ish pieces to 37.
The 37 pieces can be broadly broken up as follows:
24 were self-published, mostly in my personal newsletter
12 were school assignments
1 was written for a magazine
So that was that. I’ve written a lot about myself. It has always made me feel a little bit weird to have shared so much about myself with so many people, but at the same time, I appreciate that I have this much content I can look at again in a new way.
Note
I recently read an article from 2023 that goes over how some “momfluencers” justify sharing their kids’ lives online before they can consent with something like, “They’ll be glad someday that they can look back on all this.” And my first thought was, “But why does that necessitate putting it online when you can just get a giant external hard drive?” And then I remembered this project and went, welp, I guess I’m glad that I’m only exploiting myself.
A Quick Tangent About Basketball#
I was a journalist in a past life, and specifically a basketball journalist, which meant I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of statistics. Which stats make a basketball player “good”? Lots of people will say scoring a lot of points does — it directly helps your team outscore the other team, after all. And if you can throw in a consistently high number of rebounds, assists, or both, all the better! There are also some popular ways to combine certain stats to tell a story: the assist-to-turnover ratio allegedly shows how good a point guard is at taking care of the basketball, while stocks (steals + blocks) demonstrate a player’s defensive prowess. But it’s also pretty widely acknowledged that stats alone don’t indicate a player is “good” — there are certain intangibles, we’d say, that make a player an asset to their team. Leadership, maturity, being the last one in the gym every night, aspects of their person that make a player stand out even if their stats don’t necessarily jump off the page.
Research Questions#
My initial research questions for this corpus were as follows:
Did my writing get better (or worse) over time?
What do “better” and “worse” mean?
Can I identify any idiosyncrasies that changed (or stayed the same) over time?
What differences exist between the mediums of publication — e.g., a piece I wrote knowing others would see it vs. a piece I wrote for an instructor — if any?
And while I found it valuable to look at the corpus as a whole for my personal enjoyment (e.g., when I topic modeled and went, “Ah, yes, these topics do make sense as descriptors of the things I write about a lot”), I knew that any further distant reading would benefit from a closer look. Yes, there’s something here — this player is “good”; this piece “is especially readable” or “has short sentences” — but I needed to divide my work into smaller pieces to understand what exactly was going on.