#old-texts — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

Half An Idea

I have had half an idea. I may decide to present to a wider audience some or all of the many essays, journal entries, and academic papers I have written over the decades. While some people, apparently, have binders full of women, I have binders full of miscellaneous thoughts and I feel the urge to expose them to the world.

Image via Raw Pixel

Some of those thoughts were created through handwriting, some through typing on a mechanical typewriter, and some emerged through various stages of electronic record-keeping, and I have held on to the oldest of these documents for over fifty years.

I have already shredded a lot of writings that were personal communications between my late husband and me, and which were never intended to be read by others, but I have since wondered if that was a bad choice. Regardless, they are now gone.

So, as I thought about what to do with these other non-personal writings, it occurred to me that you might be able to help me figure out what to do. My initial idea is that I could create a new page on this blog and devote it to publishing some of this stuff. That lead to a series of questions for which I don’t have answers. That is where you come in. Please let me know your thoughts.

Should I publish none of them, all of them, or just some of the best/worst/most provocative?
Should I correct all the grammatical and/or spelling errors, or publish them as I wrote them?
Should I publish them in chronological order, or in some sort of random order (e.g. one binder at a time)?
Should I scan them and publish them as they were created, complete with errors, faded ink, and sometimes with instructors’ comments, or should I digitize them into a standard text format.
Do readers need to know the context for the writing or the dates when the pieces were written?
Would readers prefer items to be published regularly, occasionally, or rarely?
Should I shred them after they are published online?
Is this idea good, bad, or awaiting judgement?

I will appreciate your thoughts on this, even if you just tell me to get a new hobby.

#blogging #documents #idea #oldTexts #shredding #technology #thoughts #Writing