The Collected Me » Diary http://elizhunt.com Just another WordPress weblog Tue, 07 Sep 2010 19:21:03 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Collecting One’s Self http://elizhunt.com/diary/collecting-ones-self/ http://elizhunt.com/diary/collecting-ones-self/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:05:18 +0000 elizhuntadm http://elizhunt.com/?p=96 I’ve recently spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to collect the pieces of my online identity. As that’s fundamentally tied to my real-world identity, thinking about it has been a fairly extreme navel-gazing exercise. In “On Collecting Art and Culture,” James Clifford argues that creating a collection of objects is a way to create and define self. For him, the act of collecting is about the formation of self and identity. What I’m hoping to accomplish is the literal collection of my identity, strewn as it is about the real and virtual worlds. It doesn’t get more meta than that.

As a result, I’ve divided this site into sections that, roughly, correspond to some (not all) “parts” of me. There’s The Dossier for the academic me where I hope to do some more writing in the future. Design is where I’ll go on at length about topics related to the working or career me. Out and About is the bucket for data about activities taking place off this site. The Diary is for the everyday me, the walking-around-in-the-world me. Data and Digressions are offshoots of The Diary and rightly should be sub-categories of it. But all the “D” words sounded nice together and ended up looking nice in the topnav area.

So there you have it. The website deconstructed.

You might be thinking, um, that’s a pretty fancy line of thinking for a simple personal website. You’d be right. Yet the more I’ve thought about what I hope to do with this site, the more I thought the thinking needed to be done. As we produce more and more conversation online and in the real-world that is documented in some way, whether by ourselves or others, there’s an increasing need to organize it in a meaningful way. It is the collecting of self after all.
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