Digital Archive by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs
Digital Archive by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs
How should I index myself so that you can retrieve & cut me
How should I index myself so that you can retrieve & cut me . . .
One of the great joys of poetry, to me, has always been sharing it. As a result, I love talking about it—about poems I love and (claim to) understand, and about those of which are shared with me.
I really enjoy the cadence of this piece, and the choice of language is informal yet strong enough to carry the weight of the ideas its conveying. I've never read it before now. What is it that you find most enjoyable?
a digital archive is something I've thought about often actually. if someone were to try to piece together who I am based just on the data they collected about me from my multitude of accounts scattered across the internet, what kind of impression would it give? I realized any descendants looking through my journals would have to look through social media accounts to understand me as well. And my digital journal entries, and various files, and reviews, etc. Does it ever really end? Digital historians and archivists will really have their work cut out for them.
So I guess I was predisposed to like the content of the poem. The structure and, like you said, the cadence, just make it that much more enjoyable.
I'd like to think that our digital traces could compose a sort of self-portrait like those images that describe movies by the average color of every frame. For instance, this is the whole Harry Potter series in one go.
It doesn't look like much, but if you're familiar with the movie you can follow the plot just based on your memory of the scenes' colors. I like the idea of my digital footprint leaving a similar "ghost" that doesn't mean anything unless you can fill up the negative space with context.