Diaries & journals
This started as a comment in ibid's LiveJournal, but then expanded into a full post.
Like ibid I have kept a diary since I was 11. At first in a pocket notebook, in which I wrote all sorts of things, but occasionally dated diary entries for things that happened on a certain day, mainly things I saw while out riding on my horse or bicycle -- usually things like dead dogs.
At Christmas my father got a pocket diary from a firm his firm had dealings with -- chemical suppliers advertising their wares. I think he would rather have had a bottle of whisky and he gave the diary to me, and I entered stuff in it, with many gaps. It also had things that interested me, like periodic tables of chemical elements. The same happened the following year. For the next couple of years I bought my own -- a Letts schoolboys diary. These all had a week's entries on facing pages, so sometimes there was empty space when nothing much happened, and at other times, it was all cramped up.
What really got me going, however, was reading Dracula when I was about 16, and then, like ibid, I used spiral notebooks. I wrote on one side of the page and stuck photos on the other side. At first I used the Russian alphabet, and as time went by I used more and more Russian words too, though I never learned enough to write it completely in Russian. Most of my friends couldn't read it, so I could show them the photos without necessarily letting them read what I thought about them. Later I used the Shaw alphabet (which saved space). I rewrote all the earlier ones as well, expanding some of the entries from memory.
Later I moved to hardbound books, and I continued that until 1987, when I began using the Sidekick program on a computer. I began recording things on the computer with the intention of transcribing them later, but often have not done so, so my hard-copy diaries have gaps, but I continued the computer entries.
More recently I've begun transcribing my old entries (since the age of 11) into a text database program. I started doing that because of my interest in family history, and I wanted to collect all the references to my grandmother, at a time when I lived quite close to her. So I transcribed the entries using Wordstar, and later moved them to XyWrite, which could index them in printed form. I continued transcribing the next period of my life, when I went to Namibia, and was far from my grandmother, because it was an interesting period of Namibian history. I printed out part of it, and sent it to the Namibian archives, indexed and with explanatory notes, though with purely personal stuff removed, and the archivist was grateful, saying they had very little material from that period.
Later still I began moving these to a text database program. It started as a kind of indexing project, to be able to find things in the hard copy version, but now I've begun transcribing the full entries. I've done about 15750 so far, either in full or summarised, and try to do a few each day. This has meant rereading some of the things I wrote years ago, and haven't looked at since. It's called to mind people and I'd forgotten about. I also note howe much neater my writing was when I wrote with a dip pen rather than a fountain pen, and the volumes I wrote in Russian cursive script look rather good. My teachers always complained about my messy handwriting at school, but those, written just after I left school, look pretty good to me.
Since I've been keeping it electronically, I've also become far more reliant on my diary for various purposes. If I want to write a report, I enter a few keywords and get all the diary entries related to the topic. I use it to keep track of what I've taught and to whom. If necessary I can export those entries, and then edit them to make it the basis of the report; it saves a lot of rewriting.
Occasionally, but not very often, I put material from my LJ or other blogs in my diary and vice versa. But their purposes are different. My personal diary is an aid to my own memory. My LJ and other blogs are things that I think may be of interest to other people, or may prompt interaction. My LiveJournal is usually things I've seen or experienced; my Blogger journal, Notes from underground is more about ideas and opinions -- political, social, theological -- that I would like to get responses to from other people, either to help clarify my own ideas, or to help in writing an article or book, teaching a class or something. So I see both the LiveJournal and the Blogger one as something different from my personal diary, though there is some overlap.
Like ibid I have kept a diary since I was 11. At first in a pocket notebook, in which I wrote all sorts of things, but occasionally dated diary entries for things that happened on a certain day, mainly things I saw while out riding on my horse or bicycle -- usually things like dead dogs.
At Christmas my father got a pocket diary from a firm his firm had dealings with -- chemical suppliers advertising their wares. I think he would rather have had a bottle of whisky and he gave the diary to me, and I entered stuff in it, with many gaps. It also had things that interested me, like periodic tables of chemical elements. The same happened the following year. For the next couple of years I bought my own -- a Letts schoolboys diary. These all had a week's entries on facing pages, so sometimes there was empty space when nothing much happened, and at other times, it was all cramped up.
What really got me going, however, was reading Dracula when I was about 16, and then, like ibid, I used spiral notebooks. I wrote on one side of the page and stuck photos on the other side. At first I used the Russian alphabet, and as time went by I used more and more Russian words too, though I never learned enough to write it completely in Russian. Most of my friends couldn't read it, so I could show them the photos without necessarily letting them read what I thought about them. Later I used the Shaw alphabet (which saved space). I rewrote all the earlier ones as well, expanding some of the entries from memory.
Later I moved to hardbound books, and I continued that until 1987, when I began using the Sidekick program on a computer. I began recording things on the computer with the intention of transcribing them later, but often have not done so, so my hard-copy diaries have gaps, but I continued the computer entries.
More recently I've begun transcribing my old entries (since the age of 11) into a text database program. I started doing that because of my interest in family history, and I wanted to collect all the references to my grandmother, at a time when I lived quite close to her. So I transcribed the entries using Wordstar, and later moved them to XyWrite, which could index them in printed form. I continued transcribing the next period of my life, when I went to Namibia, and was far from my grandmother, because it was an interesting period of Namibian history. I printed out part of it, and sent it to the Namibian archives, indexed and with explanatory notes, though with purely personal stuff removed, and the archivist was grateful, saying they had very little material from that period.
Later still I began moving these to a text database program. It started as a kind of indexing project, to be able to find things in the hard copy version, but now I've begun transcribing the full entries. I've done about 15750 so far, either in full or summarised, and try to do a few each day. This has meant rereading some of the things I wrote years ago, and haven't looked at since. It's called to mind people and I'd forgotten about. I also note howe much neater my writing was when I wrote with a dip pen rather than a fountain pen, and the volumes I wrote in Russian cursive script look rather good. My teachers always complained about my messy handwriting at school, but those, written just after I left school, look pretty good to me.
Since I've been keeping it electronically, I've also become far more reliant on my diary for various purposes. If I want to write a report, I enter a few keywords and get all the diary entries related to the topic. I use it to keep track of what I've taught and to whom. If necessary I can export those entries, and then edit them to make it the basis of the report; it saves a lot of rewriting.
Occasionally, but not very often, I put material from my LJ or other blogs in my diary and vice versa. But their purposes are different. My personal diary is an aid to my own memory. My LJ and other blogs are things that I think may be of interest to other people, or may prompt interaction. My LiveJournal is usually things I've seen or experienced; my Blogger journal, Notes from underground is more about ideas and opinions -- political, social, theological -- that I would like to get responses to from other people, either to help clarify my own ideas, or to help in writing an article or book, teaching a class or something. So I see both the LiveJournal and the Blogger one as something different from my personal diary, though there is some overlap.