Browse Exhibits (6 total)
Expeditions, Exploration, and Foreign Experiences through Everyday Writing
Ticket stubs, maps, social media posts of travel...these are all examples of everyday writing that we oftentimes save from trips abroad to countries around the world. Why? Because we can't stay in those places forever. One of the most important affordances of everyday writing is its ability to provide us with memories. Looking at photos and souvenirs that we keep from our explorations away from home help us remember the times that once were in familiar and unfamiliar areas. This exhibit is meant to display some of those artifacts that deal with travel. Whether they are Instagram posts about visiting the Grand Canyon or a ripped map detailing directions to the Sydney Opera House, all these examples of everyday writing help us to remember some of the best expeditions and explorations of our times abroad.
Many of the artifacts you will see in this exhibit come from my own personal collection. I had the opportunity to study abroad my first year at Florida State University and that experience led me to create an exhibit that documents a subject that I am passionate about.
Feel free to browse the tabs on the right side of this page to see the various everyday writing artifacts that deal with travel. Hopefully this exhibit will give you a good idea of the broad scale that is represented by everyday writing, the importance of the seemingly mundane artifacts we experience in our everyday lives, and maybe even create your own collection of everyday writing artifacts when traveling abroad!
Passports: Stories Written in Stamps
This is an exhibit of passport stamps. These little bits of exigence are seldom thought of. Let alone considered for insight into a stranger's life like one would from a poem or passage. But within each passport the pressance, absence, frequency, location, and date of stamps tell stories of cirumstance. These stamps come into existance as a biproduct of a person's choice to travel out of the boarders of the nation which they reside.
The following collections of passports will be connected based on the quantity and diversity of stamps within a passport going from high to low, to connect people of similar financial means. Each of these passports will tell us about the circumstances of their owners to varying degrees and hopefully we can learn something about these people from the writing trails they've left behind in their travels.
Preserving Ephemeral Artifacts: Tickets as Memorabilia
Tickets exist in an odd limbo of everyday writing – thousands of them are printed every day, so it can be easy to dismiss these artefacts as mass-produced. They consist of electronically imputed data onto paper; a series of words or letters, numbers, and symbols, but further examination allows for a shift from data to knowledge and emotion – the artifact can invoke thoughts, feelings, and memories from the events surrounding the moment it was received. Nancy et. Al state; “A central characteristic of these approaches to everyday writing is their attention to the mundane, ubiquitous writing practices of the non-elite, the marginalized, and the invisible;” characteristics that can easily be attributed to anyone who holds a ticket. They mark journeys, commemorate events, or permit in the participation of a hobby, and each ticket could be considered a snapshot of an individual’s experience. They are a unique and tangible memento of an event that can easily be carried, saved, and cherished.
The items can vary through date, time, location, and design. As Estrem states in Writing is a Knowledge Making Activity, “Texts where this kind of knowledge making takes place can be formal or informal, and they are sometimes ephemeral… These texts are generative and central to meaning making even though we often don't identify them as such.” Such is the nature of a ticket: a formal but ephemeral item from which a wealth of knowledge can be collected – means of travel, genre preferences, hobbies, and key life events, (to name a few) – to draw meaning from.
Traveling Words: Writing on Vehicles
They are what we all see as we take to the roads: bumper stickers. While these decorative ornaments for vehicles tend to be seen as tacky, are more than often overlooked, and even go unnoticed, they reveal personal information in an interesting way. These seemingly small tidbits of information give insight as to who the driver or owner of a vehicle is, revealing their interests, likes and dislikes, personality traits, family history, political standings, education, and much more. Whether it is a bumper sticker, car decal, window paint, or another type of vehicular tattoo, these forms of everyday writing reveal information that would otherwise be unknown by those in passing vehicles. It's quite common to feel uncomfortable sharing personal information, especially upon initial introductions, however, writing on vehicles provides us with first impressions that otherwise never would have been had. Beyond this, writing on vehicles functions as a form of expression for humankind without even being acknowledged as such. While these writings can go ignored, there is beauty in their simplicity. Writing on vehicles allows for self-expression that follows drivers wherever they travel, functioning as a platform to share personal information and establish social connections with strangers in an unconventional way.
Travel Logs: A Practice of Reflection
Travel logs are written reflections of travel experiences. Each author chooses to focus on different aspects of travel – the food or the people, the lessons or challenges. They also make choices about when and how they reflect on their travel. Some keep daily logs and others choose to reflect weeks, months, or even years after their trips. This collection, which features one handwritten travel log and two digital social media logs, demonstrates the existence of travel logs in various modes and mediums. Each log and platform engages memory in different ways, some immediate and some reflective in nature. Similarly, their awareness of audience differs significantly and impacts the information recorded and the style used.
Documenting Backpacking through Instagram
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.