{"id":30588,"date":"2022-08-04T00:27:00","date_gmt":"2022-08-04T00:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=30588"},"modified":"2022-08-06T13:27:06","modified_gmt":"2022-08-06T13:27:06","slug":"handwritten-diaries-may-feel-old-fashioned-but-they-offer-insights-that-digital-diaries-just-cant-match","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/handwritten-diaries-may-feel-old-fashioned-but-they-offer-insights-that-digital-diaries-just-cant-match\/","title":{"rendered":"Handwritten diaries may feel old fashioned, but they offer insights that digital diaries just can\u2019t match"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Paula Vene Smith<\/a>, Grinnell College<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first time I taught a college course called \u201cThe London Diary\u201d for young Americans studying abroad back in 2002, each student ended up with a tangible book of memories, a handwritten record of their semester in London. But when I<\/a> taught the course 15 years later, the first question my students asked was whether they could keep their journals online. The question brought home to me how the image of a diary has shifted from words scribbled in a blank book to images and digital text on a screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why not go digital?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Even while journaling apps like Penzu<\/a> and Diaro<\/a> become more widely available, estimates<\/a> and surveys<\/a> suggest that a sizable number<\/a> of the world\u2019s diary keepers still keep handwritten diaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fans of digital diaries grant them an edge in convenience, portability, searchability and password protection. Jonathan, one of my 2018 students, described in an essay for class how digital diarists can upload entries to multiple platforms, keeping some portions offline or restricted to a select audience while other parts go completely public. It\u2019s harder to control distribution, encrypt entries or build an index with a journal kept on paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I already expected my students to use electronic devices to read course materials, to communicate with me and with their families back home, to write essays for class, and to navigate London. Why not let them keep digital diaries, too?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Man
Handwritten journals offer clues into the author\u2019s life that digital diaries may not. ljubaphoto\/E+ via Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Diary as artifact<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Poet and literary scholar Anna Jackson was researching the private papers of novelist Katherine Mansfield for her book \u201cDiary Poetics<\/a>\u201d when she made an unexpected discovery. Jackson came across a \u201cpiece of the world\u201d that was also an element of Mansfield\u2019s journal \u2013 a kowhai flower between two pages in a notebook:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAfter all this time, there it still was, still yellow, still between the same two pages Mansfield had placed it between all those years ago. A piece of the world she wrote about was right there as a piece of the world still, not a piece of writing.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Jackson\u2019s experience shows the power of holding in your hand the diary as a physical object. What scholars call the manuscript\u2019s \u201cmateriality\u201d links writer to reader in an unexpectedly intimate way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For historians and diary scholars, manuscripts are artifacts. A book\u2019s binding, paper quality and ink can signal an anonymous diarist\u2019s socioeconomic status. Changes in penmanship may show how the writer felt \u2013 drowsy, extra careful or agitated \u2013 while writing certain passages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some clues, like the bit of evidence provided by inserting a memento, relay intentional messages. Others, like crossed-out words, may reveal information the writer did not plan to share.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Physical evidence can also hint at what happened after a text was written. Damaged or missing pages may indicate a strong reaction to the contents. A few years ago, conservators at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, discovered a concealed entry<\/a> in the diary of a 17th-century British sailor. In his diary, he originally confessed to committing a rape, but later wrote a different account of the event, pasting the new page so carefully over the original that it went unnoticed for more than 300 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digital yet material<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Every original mark in a diary reflects an impulse of the moment. As diary instructor Tristine Rainer says in \u201cThe New Diary<\/a>,\u201d \u201cAt any time you can change your point of view, your style, your book, the pen you write with, the direction you write on the pages, the language in which you write, the subjects you include. \u2026 It\u2019s your book, yours alone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With so many convenient features, digital diaries remain a popular choice. This option, we might be surprised to learn, even has its own form of materiality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cHow to Read a Diary<\/a>,\u201d literature scholar Desir\u00e9e Henderson notes that digital diaries, too, are objects, shaped by tools the diarist selects \u2013 in this case, software and hardware \u2013 to create the diary. The writer\u2019s design choices, such as site structure, networking parameters, embedding of graphics, image and audio files and hyperlinks, offer grist for interpretation not unlike reading the nonverbal signs of a traditional diary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Young
Every diary can be read as an artifact layered with meaning. Cavan Images\/Cavan via Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Writing into the future<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As I thought about offering my students the online option, I began to imagine them many years from now, coming upon that London diary from their college days. I remembered my first group of students drawing sketches on their pages, attaching a Travelcard, caf\u00e9 napkin, or theater ticket. I remembered Anna Jackson with the kowhai flower. I couldn\u2019t shake my conviction that future diary readers will be less enthralled by a digital product \u2013 even enhanced with multimedia \u2013 than by the quirky, untidy books hand-lettered by their predecessors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, I assigned my students \u2013 at least those who were physically able \u2013 to create their London diaries by hand. They could still use their phones to capture images or take preliminary notes, but in the end they would produce a material keepsake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Several students decided to write in their notebooks while also keeping a digital diary. The dual process felt natural to them. To his blog Jonathan posted, \u201cLike many children of the 21st century, I love the idea of keeping everything journaled online. This way I can make notes on my phone as I walk, have them automatically update on my computer, where I can expand with more time. If I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea, I don\u2019t need to wake up a roommate with a lamp. However, the course also requires an analog diary.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every diary, \u201canalog\u201d or digital, can be read as an artifact layered with meaning \u2013 one that conveys clues to its writer\u2019s life and times in both nonverbal signals and words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paula Vene Smith<\/a>, Professor of English, Grinnell College<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paula Vene Smith, Grinnell College The first time I taught a college course called \u201cThe London Diary\u201d for young Americans studying abroad back in 2002, each student ended up with a tangible book of memories, a handwritten record of their semester in London. But when I taught the course 15 years later, the first question […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":30589,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293,8025],"tags":[2346,7298,178,12251,12252,191,14,5226,12250,4256,525,11083,3504],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30588"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30588"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30598,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30588\/revisions\/30598"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}