An Early Post

Welcome to my personal site.

I’ve debated with myself for the past several months about what kind of format I wanted to use for a personal site and place to post research missives, some informal write throughs of my dissertation planning and design, and connections between my research and news. I thought about starting a Sub-Stack and posting there. It’s less hassle and easy to maintain. I have a few friends and people I admire who have been using it as an outlet.

But I decided to host my own site for several reasons.

Practical Reasons

On the one hand, I have practical reasons for wanting to publish on my own site. I have the skills to run a website. I started learning HTML and CSS in high school, and I have created several types of websites, including course sites, personal sites, blogs, and writing collaboratives. For almost two years, I volunteered to be a site manager too.

I know many people choose to use a site like Sub-Stack or Medium (which I have also done in the past) because it removes many of the technical challenges. Let’s face it, setting up a server, designing, and managing a site is difficult. It’s not usually the primary motivation for why people turn to writing. And it can be super time consuming. It feels like the time spent on management takes away from the main goal of sharing the writing.

But the truth is I do have some ability to make it work. And I can do it. So if for no better reason than to demonstrate and practice some of my coding skills, I chose to host the individual site on my own. This way I can control some of the design, and I get the chance to review HTML and CSS and build something that I am proud of and is my own product.

It feels good to go back to some of my roots. I don’t work in an overly technical field. But I do feel pride in myself when I figure out how to fix a small error or adjust the script to achieve a final result. Those kinds of small achievements are great motivators for me to continue to build and work on the site.

Fighting the Algorithm

It’s not just the chance to practice skills though. At a broader level, I share the wider concern about my data and the push toward increasing engagement. One of the reasons that I had considered to use Sub-Stack especially was because I thought it might be a good place to find a broader audience. I still there are parts of that which are true. But I’m no longer convinced. Rather I think if I want to read something I should have the control over how I access that information.

I agree with articles like this one which point out that in the early days it seemed like Sub-Stack was a great option for young writers, not only because it simplified the technology but because it put the focus on writing and reading. It was based on organizing readership, and it encouraged slow reading.

When I first discovered it, I was genuinely excited that it promoted long-form writing. Some writers said they also felt liberated by the format, as it offered them a chance to write more in their personal voice. Even though so many people claimed that long-form was a dead-end, and our attention spans had become so short that the feature essay was a thing of the past, many of the early writers on Sub-Stack (and actually it’s still true today) write in long-form.

However, in the past couple of years, that platform has especially borrowed from other social media models like X or Facebook. Some of the recent turn to notes feels like a repeat of the changes that occurred at other social media platforms. I have left (fled?) those platforms. I do not want to participate in the cycle of negativity, misinformation, and general feeling of hopelessness I find there. The only kinds of posts that are promoted are those that seem to feed angry, outrage, and tribalism.

I want to control what I write and put out instead. Maybe I am naive. After all, I am still having to pay to host the site. I do recognize, of course, the potential of relying on other institutions to support the other kind of work. But maybe it is the process of putting in all the work that cultivates the reward?

Besides that, I do not want to feel as though I am trying to optimize my writing simply to get more engagement. My goal is more about sharing my passion and love. I want to write about how my research connects to current events, share thoughts about new publications and research, and generally talk about the exciting finds I am seeing through my research, archival work, and museum experience.

Writing

I hope over the next few weeks and months to continue adding to these posts with some additional material. I have imagined a few different genres that I will try to experiment with: current events, interesting historical objects, reflections on methodology and theories in timekeeping, some in-situ research notes, and reviews of some recent works.

Let’s see where it leads.