Reading Digitized Diaries: Privacy and the Digital Life-Writing Archive

ABSTRACT

As digital interfaces increasingly serve as access points to historical autobiographical genres such as diaries, it is necessary to consider the influence digitization exerts upon readers and texts. The author explores the ways that reading manuscript diaries online shapes readers' understanding of the diary and the privacy of the genre.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the students in my fall 2015 courses on early American autobiography whose work with digitized diaries sharpened my understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of these materials.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Some facsimile editions reproduce the visual appearance of diaries, such as The Diary of Frida Kahlo or Lejeune and Bogaert's Un journal à soi. Yet it is far more common for print editions to consist of textual transcription with minimal illustration—a fact likely determined by publication costs but with significant consequences for the study of the diary.

2. See, for instance, Cardell; McNeil; Podnieks; Sorapure. Kitzmann's discussion of online diaries opens by staging a scenario similar to that described in this essay, with the emphasis in Kitzmann's case on the difference between writing a diary with pen and paper versus on a computer. See also Lejeune's essays in On Diary, which are foundational for understanding the diary as a modern genre.

3. In this essay, I do not discuss diaries made available through CD-ROM or databases. Generally, these formats duplicate print editions of diaries, without the reproduction of manuscripts that I believe is the major contribution of digitized diaries. They are also proprietary and accessible only to a limited audience, as compared to all the sites I discuss, which are openly available online.

4. An index of these digitized diaries is available on my personal website as a resource for other scholars and students (see Henderson).

5. This overview is based on the digitized diaries I had indexed as of February 2016. I have based my dating of the diaries on the earliest starting date for each diary, which does not account for diarists who wrote over the span of many years or on an irregular basis.

6. On the history of the diary, see Mallon; McCarthy; Sherman.

7. For more on the legalities that surround the reproduction of private materials such as diaries, see Van Raemdonck.

8. Nolan also acknowledges the scholarly bias toward the study of manuscripts, which she describes as a kind of “magical thinking” which suggests that touching an original manuscript imparts a quasi-mystical insight into the text (475).

9. See Scott.

10. Warner discusses yet-to-be-developed digitization technologies to capture the nonvisual aspects of texts.

11. Livingstone's practice was to take rough notes and then write an expanded version of events in separate notebooks, sometimes years after the first record was made. Livingstone's 1871 Field Diary allows readers to see the three versions of Livingstone's accounts side by side.

12. The hashtag #volunpeer is used by the community of Smithsonian transcribers on Twitter, although the term is not limited to this context (see Ferriter).

13. See Smithsonian Digital Volunteers.

14. See the home page of Operation War Diary.

15. My discussion of the rethinking of the privacy of the diary genre follows the scholarly interventions made by Bloom; Bunkers; Cardell; Lejeune; Huff; Rosenwald; Sinor; and Spacks. On the perception of diary editors as collaborators, see Bunkers (“Whose”).

16. Hinton's diary is also a wonderful example of a diary that employs an elaborate code to hide information that appears not at all secret. As Spacks notes, “in practice, what we protect when we protect our privacy is often remarkably trivial” (167).

17. On the distinction, see Kline; and Perdue.

18. While there is an extensive body of scholarship on the theory and practice of producing digital critical editions (growing out of scholarship on the textual editing of print editions), for the most part the implications for readers are understudied. For more on digital editing, see, among others, Gabler; Pierazzo; Robinson.

19. Here my language deliberately echoes Abbott, who writes in his study of diary fiction about the conceit of the “cloistered” author or text (11).