Identity as Collection; Collection as Identity

Photo of bookshelf in family home

A photo I took of a bookshelf in the home where I grew up.

About a month ago we discussed Participation and Identity in this course; you might remember that Kathryn and I spoke a lot about Jorge Luis Borges, while Megan Brown and I spoke about Tumblr a bit. The gist of the conversation was that, for a person who collects a number of things, that collection might become an identity for that person: I’m thinking of a reblog tumblr, where a person makes no “original” content but still conveys a sense of themselves through the things they chose to add to their collection. For instance, I am one of those people who reblog photographs of snails. Also, mycology tumblrs are a bigger thing than you might expect. If you prefer something more high-culture, I’ll add the Borges quote again:

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.

I haven’t been able to put together any concrete thoughts on this, so I’m not going to give this a full-post treatment, but since then I’ve been toying with the observation that GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and other such glamourous institutions) also have collections. You could also consider the GLAM’s collection a key component of its identity. I’m wondering if there’s any way to tie these two things together: the identity-as-collection of social media and the identity-as-collection of GLAMs. Can the practices of one be used to promote the practices of the other? The Horniman’s tumblr might be a place to look: could a library start a similar project (a book-by-book examination of the library?), linked in with the catalogue/OPAC in some way?

A related concept: making a portrait of someone by taking a photograph of books selected from their bookshelves was one of the Art Assignment’s art assignments.

Twitterary Theory: Meaning, Context, and Responsibility

Tweeting in Context

Gustavo Gomes, CC BY 2.0: https://flic.kr/p/57P7Ms

A few days ago Fiona wrote two posts about Twitter, tweets, and Twitter essays: in the first, she discusses Jeet Heer, who numbers tweets to structure them together into an essay; in the second, she talks about how a person ought to read tweets. In particular, Steven Salaita had an offer for a tenure position withdrawn over a tweet which seemed, on its own, to be incendiary:

Zionists: transforming “anti-semitism” from something horrible into something honorable since 1948.

Salaita claims that, in the context of his overall Twitter career, this tweet isn’t as bad as it looks; it means something different when it is part of a whole. Fiona therefore asks the following question:

How far forward or back in someone’s tweet corpus must we look to be satisfied we have enough context? What are our responsibilities as readers? What are the boundaries of a twitter storm? What is the flock that holds our unmarked sheep?

I want to approach this question—approach, not answer—but first we need to get into some literary theory.

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