THE DIARISTS’ AUDIENCE
Introduction
Inspired by the methods of Mass Observation (MO), the Sharing Practice Project, usually known as the Share Project (SP), collected diaries from academics in UK Higher Education over the course of the academic year September 2010 to August 2011. Respondents were asked to keep a diary for one day of each month – the 15th – so that, taken together, the diaries form a series of “day surveys”. The specific solicitation was:
Day Surveys ask that you keep a diary for the 15th day of the month detailing what you do (especially with regard to teaching) and what you think and feel about it.
The purpose of Day Surveys is to discover what is significant in academics’ lives – not what someone else thinks should be significant. We want you to tell us what you really do. We’re interested in detail and nuance, in the gaps between what is supposed to happen and what does happen, between staff and student, between institution and individual.
Thinking, planning, preparation, lecturing, assessment, graduate student supervision, undergraduate project-work, marking, examination. Anything that you do on a survey day – anything you care about on that day – is important and interesting to us. Survey days follow the rhythm of the teaching year and patterns of work across the days of the week.
Eventually, 389 diarists registered, although not all wrote every month. Share Project diaries are unusual (qua diaries) in two important respects. One is that there was a known, knowable and external audience, for they were written for the project; the other is that (from the outset) the diaries had a defined and limited span, they started in September 2010 and finished in August 2011. As a genre, whilst diaries always have a defined start date, they finish in various and odd ways, infrequently by intent, more commonly by desuetude (Lejeune, 2009) while these had stricter boundaries.
Thus, with the day surveys, the Share Project gathered life documents in the most straightforward form of diary research “simply where informants keep diaries” (Plummer, 2001: 49). Methodologically, we chose diaries because they capture “the immediately contemporaneous flow of public and private events that are significant to the diarist” (Plummer, 2001: 48) without researcher intervention or direction.In this part of the project, we were not concerned to seek abstraction, but to expose the situated subjectivity of academic work.
The Audience
From the start, the Share diaries were never “private” diaries, and were never context-free. They were explicitly written for the project; diarists had to register with the Share Project website, and had to enter text there every month. There was no link between their identity and their entries, and there was no link between participants, for although they could see their own past entries they could read no-one else’s. Nevertheless, some participants came to the project with an audience in mind. Sometimes this was the researchers themselves:
I want to take a moment to thank Sally and the other people who started this project. It is very interesting to me ... I look forward to seeing the report you write on this project at some point in the future.(SP119, September entry)
For some, the audience was more long term:
So, an initial entry for the “sharing” project. Before diving into the details of my mid-September day I think it’s worth outlining the reasons why I’m excited about the opportunity to be involved. Firstly, this current project reminded me of the Victoria Wood drama “Housewife, 49” based on the war-time Mass Observation diaries of Nella Last. We are hearing a lot at the moment about “the student experience” and a number of exciting projects are underway to capture the realities of being a student at the start of the 21st century. I am attracted by the potential richness of diarising “the academic experience” in a warts-n-all manner. (SP168, September entry)
Despite our guarantees that anonymity would be preserved, and the careful statements asking participants not to inadvertently identify themselves, some entries were aimed at an audience far from the Share Project itself, a manifesto for history:
On Wednesday 15th September at <named> University we began to dismantle the excellent, widely praised English degree which we have together shaped, developed, honed, critiqued and delivered for many years. (SP170, September entry)
However, the ironic fact is that (whatever they imagined) I was, quite literally, the diarists’ audience. Over the year, I was the only person to read every diary entry. This was both daunting and a privilege: I had to read the diaries, they were texts (in some sense) I solicited. Unlike ordinary diaries, they were written to be read, and they demanded to be read: but I also got to read them, which no-one else did. Because the entries were not filtered through a series of researcher-generated questions and lenses (although not uncensored) they are compelling in their intimacy and immediacy. This imposes a responsibility of respect on me, as researcher, a respect for what I see as their authentic voice and my responsibility to preserve that without distortion or unnecessary interpretation.
The Newsletter
Although not planned at the time of the funding proposal, it became apparent that there would have to be some sort of feedback to the Share Project participants. They could not be expected to maintain their commitment to contribute in the face of a vacuum. The 1930s MO had provided its respondents with “bulletins” which consisted of two or three printed sides providing informal feedback on responses to the previous month’s “directive” with a flavour of half-way analysis. MO utilised several kinds of enquiry at various points over its life. Among the most common were: a series of questions sent out each month, called directives; a panel of contributors who kept a diary on the 12th of each month; and participant observation, by both researchers and Observers.
For example, the newsletter of May 1939 contained responses to a series of questions on men’s clothes. It included some direct quotes, for example: “I would not be seen dead in a bowler”and “A bowler hat must be worn in London”and “When I say I’m not conservative about clothes, I don’t mean that I wear the wrong things together, for example, a bowler hat with flannel trousers”. It also included some “facts and figures”, such as “of those who spend £4 and under on a suit, 27% would spend more if they could” and some interpretation “One of the original functions of dress, apart from protection from the weather, was self-display or, in Freudian language, exhibitionism. Yet in our society men, (as voiced by Observers) want their clothes to make them inconspicuous. So one can deduce the exhibitionism is repressed; and some Observers report that on entering a tailor’s shop they feel guilty and anxious”. There is some evidence that these reports were liked by the Observers. In September 1950 part of the directive was, self-reflectively, about the questions asked. As might be expected, most of the responses were positive:
I compliment you: I’ve never felt a question not worthwhile. Often they’re great fun: sometimes dull but useful, occasionally obscure but I think there is point in them all. (MO732)
The fact that you find fit to include any question in your directives is sufficient reason for me to have a go at answering the question. (MO1921)
As I haven’t kept the directives (I only keep the newsletters) I can’t remember what we’ve had to answer (MO 83)
In SP there was no time to undertake even preliminary analysis, so our newsletter (called The Day Survey Reporter) was compiled exclusively from extracts from participants’ diaries, their own words chosen by me to reflect common themes and concerns. In this choice I accepted the additional responsibility that the Reporter should honestly reflect the collective, as well as the individual. So, as I read through the diaries, I noted the emergence of common areas of concern, common themes. It seemed important that singular events, attitudes and ideas should not be given prominence. Unless intended as a humorous “aside”, no section of the Reporter contained only one extract. All quotes were included in groups, as collections to illustratethemes. In part, this was in order to address the issue of typicality, to (silently, contextually) reassure the contributors – if a single vehement idea was included then there was the chance a diarist could think that they were in some way unusual and/or that they were being “picked on”. In part this was also to address the issue of selectivity, to reassure myself that extracts weren’t included on my fancy or whim alone, but because they were genuinely representative of what participants were writing in that month’s diaries.
In a very practical sense, it would have been hard to collate a newsletter in any other way. The diaries were being collected in real time, and to break out of that mode and read “through” the time line of an individual, although possible, would have been difficult.
The Reporter was sent to all SP participants as a response and “thank you” every month; additionally copies were sent to the Times Higher (THE) and Mass Observation. On six occasions, the THE extracted material from the newsletter and published it (24 February 2011, 19 May 2011, 17 July 2011, 28 July 2011, 22 September 2011, 4 November 2011). One of the consequences of publication was unexpected:
Monday 15 November 2010: Have decided not to write this month. A quote from my September diary in the THE referred to an event within the institution on 15th. I’ve not heard that anyone here read it, but it’s kind of put me off. Maybe next month.” (SP206, November entry)
Here, the participant is both chastising and punishing (by withholding contribution) in one act, but who is their audience? SP206 was not alone in their impulse. Although SP325 did not read their own words in the press, they did respond to what they read in the newsletter:
Academics are one of the most whiniest groups of people in the work force! All they do is complain, while they have one of the best jobs in the world. Where else people get to decide what they do when other than lecture/meeting times and get to decide what direction to take their research in? I am sick of the newsletter for this survey being full of complaints by people who should probably quit their jobs if they hate them so much!
And they concluded their entry in similar fashion:
If I hear any more complaints about how bad their academic job is, I’ll probably stop participating in this academic whiners’ survey! (SP325, February entry)
Once again, the audience is unclear. Are they writing to me, the individual who extracts the words that constitute the newsletter? Or do they want to talk to the original diarists and their attitudes? Or is this a statement to be broadcast? And who will suffer if they make good their promise to cease contributing?
Continuum of Construction and “Author Intrusion”
This kind of exchange, and the method of construction of the newsletter, brings Plummer’s issue of “author intrusion” to the fore (Plummer 2001: 176). How far may I, as researcher, interpret and edit the contributors’ raw diary entries into another work, and what do the different possible degrees of intervention imply? The only words that I wrote in the Reporter were a slogan that appeared in the masthead (and which changed every month) and the section headings that the extracts were grouped under. Yet by my selection I was in a sense author of the work. I read, I extracted, I reflected the diarists back to themselves – and in doing so, shaped their responses.
Some contributors chose to correspond with me directly, outside of their diary entries (I, after all, was not anonymous to them):
Obviously my colleagues write better than I do as I’ve only supplied a pedestrian report of activities and timings. Are you content with the latter or do you want social commentary and philosophy?” (e-mail, 26 October 2010)
Think this is inspired! A colleague who is taking part has just been raving about it – said she thought it was “brilliant” – made her feel she was not alone and she says she will be more honest next month as a result (!) (e-mail, 24 September 2010)
Others used their diary entries to comment on the newsletter (these entries were in response to SP325, quoted above, whose February entry I extracted into the newsletter, but without their final sentence threatening “withholding”).
I read with interest the overview piece from February for this project, and I will admit I felt a little anger at the contributor who left work early that day to spend time with his son because it was a lovely sunny day ... I felt it was a very unfair picture of how academics live their working lives. (SP127, March entry)
In the feedback sheet from February 15th someone said something very true – we have a great job. We have flexibility about what we teach, what we research and the hours we work. Today I am working from 7:45-2:45, because it suits me & my family. (SP234, March entry)
I feel these participants are using the material from the Reporter for their own reflection, and are not addressing me, as researcher. But others wrote in two voices, one the diary entry “proper” and another, quite direct, where the intended audience is unambiguous although the request is not:
And I’d prefer this didn’t go in the monthly sum-up, thanks. (SP127, April entry)
Please don't print this anecdote in the newsletter as if my colleagues should read it they would recognise it as mine and it could cause friction (SP167, July entry)
This direct speech was not confined to comments on the newsletter, but was a relatively regular feature of the entries. Sometimes diarists explain, or excuse, their work. These entries are constructed for a reader, although their metacognitive comments may be for their future selves as much as for a separate, external audience:
Well it has been such a busy day that this is the first time I’ve had chance to jot down my thoughts (SP77, November entry)
Then I cried - how on earth I’m going to do everything by the time I go on maternity leave (in 15 weeks!) I just don’t know. Not by writing this diary entry, that’s for sure! (SP 120, February entry)
Not a full 8 hour day and I suppose I do feel the need to justify this by saying to myself – saying to you, too – about work last (Sunday) night for two hours (SP 98, August entry)
Sometimes they comment on their transgression of genre expectations, for instance that a diary requires entries to be both regular and timely:
I have missed my last four entries, for reasons that are largely connected to changed home circumstances. These have had a big impact on my normal academic life pattern, so I probably should have documented them but that didn’t happen, though I guess I could do it retrospectively. (SP290, May entry)
Will I actually complete and submit this time? After a few false starts I’m hoping so! (SP 134, March entry)
I must confess that 15th March is a crammed day, so I have started writing this on 14th March. I wrote no entry for 15th February because there was barely a nanosecond spare to think, let alone write..... (SP 25, March entry)
Sometimes they reflect on their transgression of genre boundaries, as with SP13 who asks “May I cheat?” and then “May I just paste in my blog post?” (January entry)
Thus indications of the complex construction of the entries appear throughout – sometimes guarded sometimes revelatory, sometimes truthful sometimes less so. But it is in and around the newsletter that the boundaries of author, reader, purpose and audience can be most clearly observed. 15 May 2011 was a Sunday. In the May Reporter, I included this extract:
After church (where a choir of 3 did a marvellous Byrd 3-part), I met with a 92yr old member of the congregation who has created a new crossword for the monthly church magazine for over 15 years ... and is still going strong. I am producing an edited booklet of all her crosswords to sell in aid of church funds. She is a wonderful woman - I hope I am as sprightly and as sharp and as witty as she is when I am that age. But she is lonely, and tells me that she only has one friend left. Having someone interested in putting her crosswords together has cheered her up no end. (SP 138)
This was within a collection of quotes which referred to meeting with others outside of daily routine, reported as pleasant, convivial occasions. On 25 May, I received an email:
I know all of your results are blinded etc. but if you want to send my e mail address [supplied] to the person compiling the book of crosswords for church funds (if in UK), I would be interested in potentially purchasing a couple of the completed items in due course!
The gap between author and audience that this request illustrates is large. The communication that is actually represented (writing directly to me) and the communication that is desired are quite separate, although it is unclear what the ultimate aim is. Do they want to speak to another diarist? Or to the crossword compiler? Or to donate to church funds? All these audiences are equally possible and equally out of reach.