Handwritten diaries may feel old fashioned, but they offer insights that digital diaries can't match

From salon.com

By Paula Vene Smith

Handwritten diaries and digital diaries both help preserve experiences and memories, but in different ways

he first time I taught a college course called "The London Diary" 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 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.

Why not go digital?

Even while journaling apps like Penzu and Diaro become more widely available, estimates and surveys suggest that a sizable number of the world's diary keepers still keep handwritten diaries.

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's harder to control distribution, encrypt entries or build an index with a journal kept on paper.

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?

Diary as artifact

Poet and literary scholar Anna Jackson was researching the private papers of novelist Katherine Mansfield for her book "Diary Poetics" when she made an unexpected discovery. Jackson came across a "piece of the world" that was also an element of Mansfield's journal – a kowhai flower between two pages in a notebook:

"After 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."

Jackson's experience shows the power of holding in your hand the diary as a physical object. What scholars call the manuscript's "materiality" links writer to reader in an unexpectedly intimate way.

For historians and diary scholars, manuscripts are artifacts. A book's binding, paper quality and ink can signal an anonymous diarist's socioeconomic status. Changes in penmanship may show how the writer felt – drowsy, extra careful or agitated – while writing certain passages.

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.

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 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.

Digital yet material

Every original mark in a diary reflects an impulse of the moment. As diary instructor Tristine Rainer says in "The New Diary," "At 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.... It's your book, yours alone."

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.

In "How to Read a Diary," literature scholar Desirée Henderson notes that digital diaries, too, are objects, shaped by tools the diarist selects – in this case, software and hardware – to create the diary. The writer's 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.

Woman writing in bed (Getty Images/luza studios)

Writing into the future

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, café napkin, or theatre ticket. I remembered Anna Jackson with the kowhai flower. I couldn't shake my conviction that future diary readers will be less enthralled by a digital product – even enhanced with multimedia – than by the quirky, untidy books hand-lettered by their predecessors.

In the end, I assigned my students – at least those who were physically able – 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.

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, "Like 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't need to wake up a roommate with a lamp. However, the course also requires an analogue diary."

Every diary, "analogue" or digital, can be read as an artifact layered with meaning – one that conveys clues to its writer's life and times in both non-verbal signals and words.

Paula Vene Smith is a professor of English at Grinnell College who teaches and writes about diaries.

https://www.salon.com/2022/08/21/handwritten-diaries-may-feel-old-fashioned-but-they-offer-insights-that-digital-diaries-cant-match_partner/

 

Quote

 

• "I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train."
  Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

5 Reasons to Start Keeping a Personal Diary

From shiftedmag.com

How journaling affects our thinking and stress levels. Where to start and what format is best for this?

An evening, a pile of textbooks, unfinished math homework, and a personal diary, which seems much more important at this moment than schoolwork – so many emotions and thoughts need to be written out with colourful stickers australia!

Many of us kept diaries as teenagers. But what if we revive this habit? Contrary to stereotypes, diaries are kept not only by teenagers but also by adults, and mature people. Someone was offered to lead by a psychologist, someone began to do it on their own initiative. 

Why keeping a diary is useful

This is a safe space for the physical expression of your thoughts. We are not always able to share the innermost with loved ones: someone is not around and is busy with other things, someone may not understand us, and we want to leave something only for ourselves. A diary is that personal and intimate space where we can be free in wording, are not afraid to be misunderstood, and write whatever we think is necessary.

It helps structure our thoughts. When it seems that there is a mess in the head and one thought is ahead of another, written practices help to write out everything that haunts. So we can clearly see what exactly worries us and what feelings overwhelm us. Our brain is no longer so loaded, and what is written gives new food for thought.

This is how we feel better. Sometimes we don’t have the courage to admit to ourselves how we feel. Maybe this is disappointment in a loved one, anxiety for one’s own future, or broken hopes. Keeping a diary and writing down in it all the important things that happen to us, it will be difficult to avoid the truth. By voicing our emotions, we can deal with them more easily. In this way, we allow and give ourselves the opportunity to feel them, and then analyze where they come from and how we can work with them.

All this applies to both negative and positive emotions. Scientists have proven that by “training” to see positive things, we accustom the brain to such thinking. Noticing in the diary all the good things that happened to us during the day, we begin to pay more attention to the pleasant little things in life, thereby living positive emotions more fully and brighter.

We learn to formulate and “voice” our thoughts and desires. Regular journaling develops an important skill in us: the ability to listen to ourselves, our feelings, and psychological and bodily signals. We not only notice them but also begin to embody them in reality.

A more complete picture of life is being formed. You can clearly see what life consists of in this period, in which areas we have succeeded, and in which, on the contrary, we have let go of control and given weakness.

Together, all this gives tangible results. Stress levels are reduced and the mind becomes clearer. By noticing successfully completed tasks and summing up the results of the work done, in a month you can conditionally get rid of the feeling that “not enough” is being done, and understand that in fact, we are great fellows. This helps healthy self-esteem. 

How to keep a diary?

I would recommend making this practice a regular one, and when choosing a format, focus on your own feelings: try to imagine how ideally these records would look for you. What seems to be the most important? Consistency and regularity will make this practice more effective. It is best to keep a diary in the evenings. So you can record the results of the day and analyse them without missing anything.

At first, it may be unusual to expose your feelings on paper, but over time it will become easier and it will become a pleasant routine. Try starting with the following questions:

• “What was your mood during the day today?”
• “What influenced him?”
• “How do I feel now?”
• “What good happened today?”
• “What things have been done today?”
• “Is there anything that is troubling me at the moment?”

You can identify other questions for yourself that will be meaningful to you. On the Internet, you can also find diaries that are created specifically for writing practices. They are divided into thematic spreads with questions already prepared to make it easier for you.

Don’t limit yourself to paper. You can take notes on both your phone and laptop. Or you can create a blog. Choose the format that you like. The main thing is your comfort.

Conclusion

Journaling can be an enjoyable part of your daily routine. But if this practice does not suit you, do not be discouraged – this is absolutely normal. Be sensitive to yourself and your desires!

https://shiftedmag.com/reasons-to-start-keeping-a-personal-diary/

Handwritten versus digital diaries

From kathmandupost.com

By Paula Vene Smith

The first time I taught a college course called The London Diary 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 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.

Why not go digital?

Even while journaling apps like Penzu and Diaro become more widely available, estimates and surveys suggest that a sizable number of the world’s diary keepers still keep handwritten diaries.

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’s harder to control distribution, encrypt entries or build an index with a journal kept on paper.

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?

Diary as artefact

Poet and literary scholar Anna Jackson was researching the private papers of novelist Katherine Mansfield for her book Diary Poetics when she made an unexpected discovery. Jackson came across a “piece of the world” that was also an element of Mansfield’s journal—a kowhai flower between two pages in a notebook: “After 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.”

Jackson’s experience shows the power of holding in your hand the diary as a physical object. What scholars call the manuscript’s “materiality” links writer to reader in an unexpectedly intimate way.

For historians and diary scholars, manuscripts are artefacts. A book’s binding, paper quality and ink can signal an anonymous diarist’s socioeconomic status. Changes in penmanship may show how the writer felt—drowsy, extra careful or agitated—while writing certain passages.

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.

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 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.

Digital yet material

Every original mark in a diary reflects an impulse of the moment. As diary instructor Tristine Rainer says in The New Diary, “At 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. … It’s your book, yours alone.”

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.

In How to Read a Diary, literature scholar Desirée Henderson notes that digital diaries, too, are objects, shaped by tools the diarist selects—in this case, software and hardware—to create the diary. The writer’s 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.

Writing into the future

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, café napkin, or theatre ticket. I remembered Anna Jackson with the kowhai flower. I couldn’t shake my conviction that future diary readers will be less enthralled by a digital product—even enhanced with multimedia—than by the quirky, untidy books hand-lettered by their predecessors.

In the end, I assigned my students—at least those who were physically able—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.

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, “Like 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’t need to wake up a roommate with a lamp. However, the course also requires an analogue diary.”

Every diary, “analogue” or digital, can be read as an artefact layered with meaning—one that conveys clues to its writer’s life and times in both nonverbal signals and words.

https://kathmandupost.com/columns/2022/08/13/handwritten-versus-digital-diaries

War turned this boy into an orphan. His diary is testament to his loss

From latimes.com

SHEVCHENKOVE, Ukraine — 

Before war came to his village, 12-year-old Tymophiy Z. had many of the usual tween preoccupations. And his closest confidant was his diary.

There was a special girl, Yarina, he wrote, but she ignored him. He loved the video game “Minecraft” and the family’s half-wild cats. He grumbled occasionally about his mischievous 6-year-old half-brother, Seraphim, who did not always live up to his angelic moniker. When his stepfather drank, it worried him.

Those boyhood musings were interrupted by a terrible noise in the sky on Feb. 24. Tens of thousands of Russian troops rolled across Ukraine’s borders, and suburbs of the capital, Kyiv — including Tymophiy’s farming village, Shevchenkove, some 30 miles to the northeast — were quickly overrun or menaced as the fighting drew near.

“Yesterday in the morning there was an air raid alert. You could hear in our village how planes were dropping bombs," Tymophiy wrote in a journal entry dated March 3. The family — he; Seraphim; his mother, Yulia Vashchenko, 37; and his stepfather, Serhii Yesypenko, 43, known as Serozha, hid in the cellar.

The parents began talking about trying to leave. But to where? They hesitated.

On the morning of March 8, less than two weeks into the war, the couple slipped out without waking the boys. The village market, a short distance away, was still open, and they needed the extra money they made by selling tea and other dry goods there.

After a few hours, Tymophiy wrote later, his mother called him. She was frantic. Russian armoured vehicles were rumbling through the village’s narrow lanes. She told him to grab Seraphim and hide in the bathroom. He didn’t know it then, but it would be their last conversation.

A bit later, Tymophiy’s aunt and uncle — Olena Streelets, 47, called Lena by family members, and her husband, Serihy Provornov, 63 — arrived and hurried the boys to their nearby house. They told the brothers that their parents had been called away to Kyiv, but that fighting made it impossible for them to return just now.

Tymophiy, whose full name is being withheld because he is a minor, was worried but not unduly so. The rush of events — the thunder of artillery, Seraphim’s antics, settling into their aunt and uncle’s cramped home — kept him distracted.

“I have gotten used to shells flying over my head,” he wrote on March 13. “We still don’t have electricity.”

The diary of Tymophiy sits on a table at his family’s home in Shevchenkove, Ukraine.

(Kyrylo Svietashov / For The Times)

More days went by, and Lena and Serihy made excuses over Yulia and Serozha’s absence. It was Seraphim — the unnoticed little eavesdropper, overhearing low-voiced, anguished adult conversations — who blurted out the truth.

Tymophiy raged to his diary, his fury at first overwhelming his grief. In slashing red ink, he drew a horned devil with angry darts shooting from its eyes.

“I found out what happened to my mom and Serozha,” reads a March 14 entry, nearly a week after the deaths. “They were killed!”

His aunt and uncle had held back yet more unbearable news. The bodies of the couple — who died from large-calibre fire aimed nearly point-blank at their car by a Russian tank — lay mutilated, unretrieved and alone inside their silver Opel Vectra for three days while Tymophiy’s uncle tried to negotiate safe passage to collect the remains.

Like hundreds of other civilians killed by Russian troops in the once-placid Kyiv suburbs — many people slain execution-style, some corpses bearing signs of torture — Yulia and Serozha had to be buried temporarily in makeshift graves. Theirs was near a garden gazebo.

Shelling shook the village for nearly three more weeks, before the Russians pulled back as abruptly as they had come, abandoning their bid to seize the capital and regathering in the east.

The family wanted a proper funeral, but it had to wait for an exhumation and examination by forensics experts and investigators, who were collecting what was rapidly becoming a mountain of war crimes evidence. More than 1,300 bodies were recovered in the capital region alone. Russia continues to deny its troops deliberately targeted civilians.

Finally, among more than a dozen other fresh graves, the two were buried side by side in the village churchyard on April 12.

In the margins of his journal, its blue cover now decorated with drawings of a pair of ghosts and a boy’s sad face, Tymophiy wrote: “Dreams do not come true.”

Tymophiy sits in his room.

(Kyrylo Svietashov / For The Times)

The war in Ukraine has been uniquely horrific for its children. About one-third of them, more than 7.5 million youngsters, are displaced from their homes, according to United Nations estimates. At least 348 children have been reported killed as of mid-July, Ukrainian officials said, but those numbers, which do not include an accounting from still-occupied areas, are acknowledged to be low, probably dramatically so.

It’s as if childhood itself has been scoured away and something terrible has taken its place.

“I would say that every single child in Ukraine, their lives have been touched by this war,” Afshan Khan, the regional director of UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency, told reporters at the world body in June. “They’ve either lost a family member, or they have ... witnessed trauma themselves.”

In a brutal conflict heavily documented on social media and in news photographs, there was some reticence at first over circulating images of tiny corpses.

But now, nearly six months on, war and outrage propel endless online postings of disturbing photos and videos: pictures of dead children beside their dead parents, kids bandaged and bloodied in hospital beds — if they are lucky enough to make their way to one — little ones wailing and bewildered, or stunned and silent, as they are bundled into trains and vans carrying them away from the battle zone.

Sometimes, relatives who are exposed again and again to the sight of dead and maimed loved ones, especially the youngest victims, beg for a respite from the graphic images. But they keep coming.

Before the Russian invasion, Ukraine already had at least 100,000 orphans, many living in grim conditions in state care. Now their still-uncounted ranks have swelled. Family separations abound: fathers deployed to the battlefront while mothers and children seek shelter elsewhere. Whole families have been sent to “filtration” centres in occupied Russian territories, with hundreds of children ending up inside Russia proper and put up for adoption, according to Ukrainian officials.

Every day at 8 a.m., Daria Herasymchuk, an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on children’s affairs, receives a recap of the previous day’s events, including the latest on children killed, wounded, missing or believed deported. Or left motherless or fatherless, or both.

“It’s the worst moment of the day,” she said. “It’s every day.”

Lena said there was never any question that she and her common-law husband, Serihy — each on their second marriage, with adult children who long since left home — would take in Tymophiy and Seraphim. But it’s an overwhelming task.

Their run-down house consists of three tiny rooms: the bedroom, kitted out with new bunk beds for the boys; a living room with peeling paint where the couple now sleep on a double bed that also serves as the only sofa; a smoke-stained kitchen with a shower crammed behind a plastic curtain.

Serihy is working on a cinder-block addition, but for now, the yard is strewn with construction debris, and just outside the entryway, a hole in the ground is covered over with rickety boards.

Seraphim is in perpetual motion. He leaps onto the sofa bed demanding to be tickled, drags around a watering can nearly as big as him, rolls around on the floor, waving his feet in the air. He giggles and shrieks, but though seemingly thirsty for attention, he is far less verbal than most children his age.

“We have to take shifts with him,” said Lena, a former kindergarten teacher, ruffling his hair.

Tymophiy, towheaded like his brother, has a sloping visage that foretells a blunt-faced manhood. He can appear simultaneously childlike and old, with pale eyes often either downcast or fixed in an unsettlingly intense stare.

His main hobby these days is collecting “frags” from village lanes and yards — heavy, jagged bits of shell casings and rockets, which he likes to thrust into visitors’ hands.

The family is receiving some government support, including regular sessions with a counselor for both boys. But Tymophiy scowled when asked about his sessions with the therapist.

“There are plenty of things I don’t tell him,” he said, looking away.

He doesn’t sleep well, he said. Sometimes he thinks he sees eyes watching him in the dark. The early summer light bothers him. He wakes up tired; at night, he must comfort Seraphim when he cries out.

This is the boys’ home now — but perhaps only for now. The sisters of Tymophiy’s stepfather, now estranged from Lena and Serihy, have moved into the family home a few streets away. They want to adopt Seraphim, their blood relative, his aunt and uncle said.

Tymophiy and Seraphim play in their room.

(Kyrylo Svietashov / For The Times)

Lena and Serihy are adamant the boys should not be separated and want to keep both of them. But the situation is complicated by family acrimony, missing documents and the unknown fate of Tymophiy’s father, who has not been heard from in years.

Tymophiy picks up his diary only sporadically now, he said. He sometimes writes in what he describes as a private code and makes other entries in invisible ink. He willingly shows off the volumes but also declares angrily that the journals have brought him too much attention. Once a constant and a comfort, the diary-keeping has turned as strange as the upside-down world around him.

“Sometimes I just want to burn them!” he said.

In the village, some aspects of normal life are beginning to resume. Flowers poke up through rubble. There is talk of school starting at some point. The market near where Yulia and Serozha died is open again.

Some of the family cats disappeared during the fighting, but others made their way home or were born weeks later. Tymophiy scooped up a limp-looking grey kitten, nuzzling it. That helps him sleep, he said.

Lena, a decade older than her dead sister, tears up when she reminisces about Tymophiy’s mother, although she does so only if she is out of his sight and hearing. Yulia’s turbulent relationship with Tymophiy’s father nearly broke her, in the elder sister’s telling. He abandoned her when the boy was still a baby.

But as a single mother still in her 20s, Yulia rallied and finished her education in Kyiv, Lena said. She got together nearly a decade ago with Seraphim’s father and moved back to the village, and the pair rejoiced six years ago over the birth of a baby, Seraphim.

Lena was godmother to both boys. Years ago, she would take Tymophiy to school on the back of her bicycle or, when he was small enough, snuggle him right into the front basket, where the breeze on his face made him laugh.

In her sister’s place, she said, she would do her best to mother them.

“We were family, even before this war,” she said. “Now we will try to be a new kind of family.”

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-08-05/dreams-do-not-come-true-in-ukrainian-boys-wartime-diary-lament-and-loss

Handwritten diaries may feel old fashioned, but they offer insights that digital diaries just can’t match

From theconversation.com

By Paula Vene Smith 

The first time I taught a college course called “The London Diary” 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 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.

Why not go digital?

Even while journaling apps like Penzu and Diaro become more widely available, estimates and surveys suggest that a sizable number of the world’s diary keepers still keep handwritten diaries.

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’s harder to control distribution, encrypt entries or build an index with a journal kept on paper.

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?

Diary as artifact

Poet and literary scholar Anna Jackson was researching the private papers of novelist Katherine Mansfield for her book “Diary Poetics” when she made an unexpected discovery. Jackson came across a “piece of the world” that was also an element of Mansfield’s journal – a kowhai flower between two pages in a notebook:

“After 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.”

Jackson’s experience shows the power of holding in your hand the diary as a physical object. What scholars call the manuscript’s “materiality” links writer to reader in an unexpectedly intimate way.

For historians and diary scholars, manuscripts are artifacts. A book’s binding, paper quality and ink can signal an anonymous diarist’s socioeconomic status. Changes in penmanship may show how the writer felt – drowsy, extra careful or agitated – while writing certain passages.

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.

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 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.

Digital yet material

Every original mark in a diary reflects an impulse of the moment. As diary instructor Tristine Rainer says in “The New Diary,” “At 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. … It’s your book, yours alone.”

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.

In “How to Read a Diary,” literature scholar Desirée Henderson notes that digital diaries, too, are objects, shaped by tools the diarist selects – in this case, software and hardware – to create the diary. The writer’s 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.

Writing into the future

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, café napkin, or theatre ticket. I remembered Anna Jackson with the kowhai flower. I couldn’t shake my conviction that future diary readers will be less enthralled by a digital product – even enhanced with multimedia – than by the quirky, untidy books hand-lettered by their predecessors.

In the end, I assigned my students – at least those who were physically able – 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.

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, “Like 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’t need to wake up a roommate with a lamp. However, the course also requires an analogue diary.”

Every diary, “analogue” or digital, can be read as an artifact layered with meaning – one that conveys clues to its writer’s life and times in both nonverbal signals and words. 

https://theconversation.com/handwritten-diaries-may-feel-old-fashioned-but-they-offer-insights-that-digital-diaries-just-cant-match-187508