SPECIAL ISSUE: Online Lives
Editor’s Introduction, p. v
ARTICLES
Madeleine Sorapure
Screening Moments, Scrolling Lives: Diary Writing on the Web, p. 1
An analysis of online diaries suggests some of the ways in which autobiographical stories and subjects are shaped on the Web. The computer as a writing tool, and the Web as a publishing medium, influence the practices of diary writing, affecting how diaries are written, what is written and to whom, and how they are read and interpreted.
Laurie McNeill
Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks: The Diary on the Internet, p. 24
This article examines the diary’s transformation from print culture practice to online phenomenon, considering the implications of this change for the diary as a literary genre and as life writing. This discussion explores the challenges the online diary represents to traditional concepts of the genre as private and monologic, investigating the ways in which online diarists attract readers, build communities, and create identities in cyberspace.
Andreas Kitzmann
That Different Place: Documenting the Self Within Online Environments, p. 48
This article is based on a very straightforward question: what are the differences between conventional handwritten diaries and the online diaries that are increasingly appearing on the World Wide Web? I argue that an important aspect of the differences lie in the experimental and material conditions of the Web itself.
John B. Killoran
The Gnome in the Front Yard and Other Public Figurations: Genres of Self-Presentation on Personal Home Pages, p. 66
In light of empirical research showing that personal home pages are not as personal as their reputation suggests, this paper proposes that sustained self-presentation on the Web by ordinary people has been hindered, in part, by the feeble legacy of suitable genres. Drawing on a sample of over one hundred personal home pages, this paper illustrates how, in the absence of generic precedents, public self-presentation is instead achieved through innovation with past genres.
Elayne Zalis
At Home in Cyberspace: Staging Autobiographical Scenes, p. 84
United by a common tendency to raise questions about the meaning, recollection, and locus of “home” in a digital age, the five hypermedia Web sites on this virtual tour open up arenas for staging autobiographical scenes differently. Broadening the scope of The Home Project that the trAce Online Writing Centre maintains, and drawing on theories of spatiality and cyberculture, the survey of Family Portrait, Grandfather Gets a House, The Family Album Portrait, Home Maker, and Heard It in the Playground shows how these networked experiments with collaborative storytelling and a composite approach transform personal home pages into new spaces for cultural intervention that, while merging “private” and “public” spheres, provide forums in which culturally diverse casts of characters showcase theatres of recollection for heterogeneous audiences around the world.
Helen Kennedy
Technobiography: Researching Lives, Online and Off, p. 120
This article is an argument for technobiography, a term coined in Cyborg Lives? Women’s Technobiographies, a collection I coedited in 2001. I outline what technobiography is, and how, by allowing access to what it feels like to live certain digital experiences, it can contribute to buildng a comprehensive picture of cybercultural landscapes. If we want to understand lived experiences of the Internet, we need to study not only online, virtual representations of selves, but also lives and selves situated within the social relations of the consumption and production of information and communication technologies. Drawing on two technobiographical projects—one involving a group of black, working-class women returning to education with the aid of neworked technologies and computer-mediated distance learning, and another exploring social relations in a digital multimedia production center—I indicate ways in which technobiography can contribute to this important project.
REVIEWS
Autobiography and the Construction of Identity and Community in the Middle East, edited by Mary Ann Fay, p. 140
Reviewed by Stephen Frederic Dale
Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums, by Martha Langford, p. 143
Reviewed by John A. Stotesbury
Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography, by Michael Holroyd, p. 147
Reviewed by George Simson
Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust, edited by Julia Epstein and Lori Hope Lefkowitz, p. 151
Reviewed by Ken Koltun-Fromm
Reclaiming Heimat: Trauma and Mourning in Memoirs by Jewish Austrian Reémigres, by Jacqueline Vansant, p. 153
Reviewed by Bill Niven
Difficult Reputations: Collective Memoirs of the Evil, Inept, and Controversial, by Gary Alan Fine, p. 155
Reviewed by Théo Garneau
Dr. Johnson’s Women, by Norma Clarke, p. 160
Reviewed by Sarah R. Morrison
Telling a Good One: The Process of a Native American Collaborative Biography, by Theodore Rios and Katherine Mullen Sands, p. 165
Reviewed by Nancy Shoemaker
The Feminine Gaze: A Canadian Compendium of Non-Fiction Women Authors and Their Books, 1835–1945, by Anne Innis Dagg, p. 167
Reviewed by Richard Cavell
REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 171
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest
LIFELINES, p. 237
Upcoming events, calls for papers, and news from the field
CONTRIBUTORS, p. 241
