Browse Exhibits (11 total)

Tagging and Classification Systems

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Tagging and classifications systems: we interact with them almost everyday, and yet we rarely consciously notice them; this form of writing is invisible to us. We tend to accept this form of writing as objective and static; if we search for something in a library, we don’t question how that particular book has been classified, and accept its classification as objective fact. However, how something is tagged or classified can tell you information about that thing before anything else, highlighting certain information or even making certain judgements about that thing. Further, these tags are not objective; someone had to write those tags or sort those objects, and people can, even unintentionally, bring their own biases and perspectives to their writing.

The aim of this exhibit is to highlight some specific tags within classification and tagging systems, to try to bring more attention to the existence of this hidden form of writing. While exploring this exhibit, you will be asked to consider how tags impact your perception of the thing being classified, and how certain tags may have been assigned to certain artifacts. Consider what other tags could possibly have been assigned to the objects we explore in this exhibit, and how those different tags would have impacted your understanding of those artifacts. Maybe even look at how artifacts in this exhibit are tagged within the Museum of Everyday Writing. Would you have tagged them differently? Did any particular tags lead you to this exhibit?

Click on the exhibit pages to the right to start exploring.

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Communicating through Everyday Writing

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This exhibit aims to look at the communicative property that can be applied to some examples of everyday writing.

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Code Comments: Our Fingerprint on Software

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Even in the very technical field of software design, communication matters. Code comments are snippets of "human text" that programmers use to talk to themselves and each other. They explain how a piece of code works, form to-do lists, or express frustration, joy, or surprise.

Comments are interspersed within code documents themselves and set off by special characters, which tell the system to ignore what follows because it's for the human programmer to read. Different programming languages use different conventions. For example,

<!-- this is a comment in HTML, -->

// this is a comment in C++,

# and this is a comment in Python.

Regardless of programming language, comments tend to fall into a few categories: documentation, or explaining how the code works (often required in college assignments); communication, especially important in collaborative environments; and simple expression, not serving any technical purpose.

This exhibit uses code comments written by college students to see a snapshot of how they felt when they wrote them. Software is like a machine; there is very little room for error in its design. But code comments, invisible to computers, are an unfiltered trove of information about people's experiences. They are the rare human fingerprint on an otherwise cold, mechanical system.

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The Many Faces of Instagram

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Since its conception in 2010, Instagram has evolved into a multifaceted medium in which its users can either maintain a private profile for the eyes of close friends or become a social media influencers and gain popularity. Some post their artwork while others write captions containing links to their music, both with the intention of gaining support from their followers. Celebrities and renowned corporations have taken to the platform in order to connect with potential customers through promotional advertising. What was once a platform that restricted its users to a single square-framed photo per post has become a space filled with direct messages, videos, stories, live videos, multiple pictures per post, and promotional advertisements. This noticeable growth on the platform attracted various kinds of posts to present itself on the app, even coming down to the approaches used for each post. This exhibit will showcase some of the different ways everyday writing is applied on Instagram while focusing on the manner of posts based on the user.

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Instagram: Linking the Physical to the Digital

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Instagram has become a part of our everyday lives. Depending on who you are, you may be constantly checking Instagram or some other type of social media. With the amount of users and the different objects that you can take and post, there's a whole world to be seen right from your finger tips. One interesting tag you might find worth visiting? The museum tag. 

When we think about museums, we think of them as a physical place that one has to visit. The Museum of Everyday Writing proves that this is not a completely accurate way to think. This exhibit examines the way in which Instagram connects museums from the physical world to the digital one and the effect that those who post about them have on how we perceive them.

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Documenting Backpacking through Instagram

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These artifacts come from Jessica "Dixie" Mills Instagram at @homemadewanderlust. Mills is an avid wilderness backpacker and uses her Instagram to document her travel experiences to share with her community.

As she embarks on different backpacking expeditions, she develops "series" of posts that illustrate her trips through both photography and written captions. This exhibit focuses on her series of photos on through-hiking the Continental Divide Trail. While she shares a variety of content with her followers, many of her posts categorize into photos of her expedition team, photos of herself, landscape photography, and macrophotography. Utilizing different visuals helps enhance her written captions by portraying the sensations she felt while hiking the trail, and this exhibit describes these methods in more detail.

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Handwritten Texts and Familial Love

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Everyday writing is an almost universal aspect of living in modern American culture. We use everyday writing as a catch-all instrument when we deal with constant themes and topics.  Because of this, it is only natural thatwe use everyday writing when we express the love we hold for our families. It is this deep love for family that inspires countless people to create texts for and save artifacts from their closest loved ones. The writer of smallnotebook.org captures the feelings of the people creating these artifacts very well: "Be sure the things you are saving are about you and your family. You don’t need to save the program from a friend’s wedding ceremony just to prove you care about her. That belongs in her keepsake box, not yours." (smallnotebook.org)


Cited source: http://smallnotebook.org/2012/09/10/what-to-do-with-neutral-or-negative-keepsakes/ (Neutral Keepsakes)

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Email Spam Scams and Shams

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This exhibit is organized to focus on three aspects of malicious spam: its circulation, the networks created by its dissemination, and the literacies that surround it.  

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Memes: Cultural Snapshots

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The Internet has transformed everyday writing. No longer is everyday writing restricted to physical vehicles such as letters or papers. Through technology, digital writing is at the forefront—and even more ephemeral in the fast paced technological landscape. Out of this fast turnover, one medium has managed to survive long enough to become a cultural staple: memes. Memes, in a literal sense, can be defined as combining text and images in order to relay a message, however in a broader, more figurative sense, they can be described as cultural snapshots. Richard Dawkins coined the term in his 1976 book The Selfish Genre defining it as an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. This spread of memes creates a general understanding of them amongst us, thus giving them a communal sense.

Everyday writing is a facet of writing that includes works of a casual nature—meaning the purpose of such writing is not for professional means, but rather means of convenience. Everyday writing embodies the everyday, from grocery lists, annotated notes, jotted down details, etc., it is a style of writing that captures the moment of its creation. There are memes that reference cultural phenomena like elections, celebrities, societal issues, and more, giving people a glimpse of the time they were created in. Memes fit into this category in two ways. One of which is that they can be created by anyone. All they require is an image and some text. The second way is that they too capture the moment of their creation.

Memes change as fast as the world around us, and people are becoming quick to create new ones to address these changes. People even use them as a means of communication (i.e. sending a meme or a GIF as opposed to a standard text message). Perhaps the reason behind the longevity of memes is how relatable they are to the millennial generation. Memes are shared so much and through so many channels that tracing them back to their original source can be a daunting task—cementing them as forms of everyday writing. In most cases, the source of a piece of everyday writing is unknown to all except the composer, so in this sense, memes are able to continually exist in the space of our lives. 

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Lists: Organizing Everyday Life

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To-do lists, reminders, schedules, and shopping lists help individuals remember tasks to be completed, items to be purchased, upcoming meetings and events, and the order in which these things all need to happen. 

As these various examples demonstrate, list-making is not a process that happens once and is then finished. Whether composed in print or digitally, lists are meant to be viewed multiple times, and altered as needed with each viewing. Some writers do this with checkmarks, others by crossing items out. Some items appear in lists multiple times, as tasks from a previous day remain incomplete and need to be added to a later date. Still other lists are adjusted to show progress made on a task, or to approximate how much time or work still remains to be done before the item can be fully "checked off the list." 

This exhibit is organized into three categories: schedule lists, task lists, and shopping lists. Though each category serves a distinct purpose, all three categories demonstrate the writers' needs to organize their thoughts and their lives by writing things down. 

 

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