Posted by For the last decade, at the end of each year, I have looked at my top blogs of the year hoping to gain some insight into what I do here asking: why do I blog? (2013), what’s my why? (2022), and what is the story?
In 2017, I even wrote out all my blog titles onto post-its notes like I do when finding the patterns in the data of a UX study because 2017 and 2016 were rich blogging years.
I would start my day with the school run, followed by Bikram in the studio at least four mornings a week, and then I went lecturing or consulting and when I wasn’t doing that, I was in the library researching my ideas and writing them up in blog form. It seemed the more I did the more I wanted to do, as in 2016, I wrote 42 blogs; in 2017, 30. So, it made sense that at the end of 2017 with probably 100,000 new words, I wanted to see them spread out.
Turned out that was good and bad, depending on how you view you it. I thought I was going to write a book because people had presented me with several opportunities to do so. However, I felt like I had to say everything, so kept on blogging to fill the gaps with the topics that I felt that I absolutely needed to address, in particular women in STEM and society and how human-computer interaction is really important, before I felt I could be ready to present a formal version to the world.
I look back at that period of blogging, Bikram, book thinking, lecturing and library life as a magical time. Even one of the dads on the playground said that I was living the dream. I definitely was.
Alas, nothing stays the same and with family crises and my mum dying, I temporarily stepped back from lecturing because I didn’t want to give my students half my attention and was just gearing up to go back full-time when we had lockdown and the Bikram studio closed too. So, I created an online course in human-computer interaction (HCI) which was something I had wanted to do for a long time.
That year, 2020, when it came to the yearly blog stats round up instead of reading the stats to see what people were liked, I picked the blogs that inspired me the most and I think that is where the first shift happened. It reflected the times I was living through as I went inwards instead of feeding the machine and feeling the pressure to write more of the same, I honoured the creator in me and the reason the blog existed. I remembered why I began writing about the bits of technology that light me up and what I love about computer science and of course, HCI.
Things may have slid back to ‘normal’, but in 2022 I inadvertently got into a row with someone about AI, so in 2023, began giving public talks to tell people how it really works as I was fed up of people talking about AI without knowing anything about it and frightening the public. This led me to reread all the things I have written about AI here so, I pulled together: The complete works.
The idea was to let things surface naturally but now with 343,000 words, it was getting harder and harder. So, I focused on giving talks and pulling together: My little book of talks last September, which was much easier to manage at 70, 000 words and is great for helping me prep, but is only a slither and barely uses the words I have written and researched here.
Being an eternal student I took a whole series of Digital Humanities courses online at Harvard University, which I loved and got to thinking about how we visualise time and space. I decided that it could be cool to perform a deep blog dive on my blog using the techniques I had learnt all about. The one quote from the course that stayed with me the most was:
Find some data that excite you and think about what questions you want that data to help you answer.
Digital Humanities, Harvard University
We do this in the hope of better interpreting the human experience. After all that is what we are after in anything we do be it searching in data or telling a story, we are looking to find the hard earned gems of wisdom from a life fully lived to light the fire for others and ask new questions. But what sort of questions?
For a while I was completely stuck as to how to proceed. I had no idea what questions I wanted to ask. It was only when I migrated my site to a new host using an XML file, that I thought that I probably could apply all the new digital humanities techniques by writing some python code because an XML representation of a WordPress database keeps all sorts of extra information:
- How many revisions I made when I was writing a blogpost. Sometimes I have spent weeks or even months pulling together my ideas.
- The date when I actually created a blogpost as opposed to when I actually published it. Sometimes I have written a blog then backdated it as I haven’t wanted it on my front page.
- What sections I ultimately deleted and ones I introduced that made the final cut in each blog.
I could tiptoe my way in, familiarise myself with my data, allowing myself to get a little bit curious before I ask: What is it that I actually want to know? What is it I am looking for?
What the data doesn’t tell you
Alongside patterns, I could also look for anomalies and whether I changed direction in any of my thinking. What questions survive my certainty? What do I still get excited about? What keeps returning even when I’m not looking for it? Then, the gap. What is missing from the data set? What did I choose not to include?
I’ve only ever deleted one blog post. It was a UX review of a feed pump which I used for two years and I got so much abuse which wasn’t even about what I had said it was people finding somewhere to vent and it was easier to remove the post. These days I have shut down all comments because I get so much spam mainly bots and sometimes people wanting a SEO boost from here. I could have left them or filtered out the worst ones, but they eat up all the bandwidth so just blocking that access keeps my site optimised.
So why would I want to do this? Why would I wish to investigate my blog? An ever increasing digital archive of nearly half a million words.
Well sometimes we may have a reason but can’t seem to articulate it which was me yesterday until I saw one of those social media reels on Facebook. In it Gillian Anderson and Davina McCall were talking about, I don’t know what exactly, I guess I was supposed to click on the link as when I scrolled back to link to it from here, I just got more new adverts and nonsense served up by the Meta machines but the gist of it was in that reel, Gillian Anderson said:
I want to be looked at adoringly
Gillian Anderson, interview
I guessed that she was talking about being an older woman ageing out of being looked at for being young and attractive, something I blogged about when I decided to no longer dye my grey hair and when I was thinking about how women show up in society and noticing the conversation around how women feel invisible. The social gaze often erases women as they age, even while continuing to demand their charm, compliance and productivity, aka behave like they are still young girls. I guess Gillian Anderson was talking about the desire to be truly seen, to be recognized, to be admired as the full complex wise person she is now, not just tolerated or overlooked.
This is not about vanity; it’s about being valued and respected especially after half a lifetime of taking care of everyone else.
When poet Maggie Smith talked about her divorce and building a new life after she had been so lost in the old one, she invoked Emily Dickinson and her famous quotation:
I am out with lanterns, looking for myself
Emily Dickinson, Dickinson/Holland letters, 1856
I always thought this was part of a poem, but in fact, Dickinson had just reluctantly moved house, so it’s not only metaphorical, she was referring to her possessions, her physical body, and her soul, her ‘deathless’ self, as she was trying to organise herself in a new place, albeit her birthplace to which she was returning.
It put me in mind of Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women who run with the wolves, who tells the tale of La Loba, the wolf woman who sings over the bones and brings them back to life in a tale of resurrection and reclamation.
A right of passage
And, so it would seem that this yearly blog gaze which I have been doing for a decade, at the end of each year and the start of a new one, is really my call to action, my desire to sing over the bones. The more I blog gaze, the more I see it. One year I even wrote about feasting on my own blogs, (2018), another one about the map on my body, (2023). Little did I know, I was spelling out my desire to honour this right of passage for women. I want to go out with lanterns, to go looking for myself, to reclaim those parts of me lost and gone, and sing over the bones to bring them back to life.
So finally, in my 20th year of blogging here it is time to begin the time-honoured tradition:
Carrying a lantern,
Ruth Stalker-Firth
I walk through my words, past echoes of unfinished drafts,
I sing over the bones of my blogs to find what I have been searching for
– myself.
I am no poet, no actress, nor do I want to be looked at adoringly. I only wish to look upon myself without the filter of societal expectations. Computer scientist, that I am, I will do this the only way I know how.
I can’t wait to meet me there.