Parallel Posts

  • “Parallel Posts are only one snippet of queer expression and to the best of my knowledge, have only been collateral damage in the mass deletion of transgender users’ Tumblrs,“
  • “I want to record them and their inalienable queerness before they are lost. Scholars can now look back on commonplace books and sentiment albums and see the quiet resistance of people reading from the margins to create new works; I have had the privilege of witnessing Parallel Posts grow in real time, and this thesis is document of that witnessing.” ⤴️
  • “Parallel Posts are transformative collages of quotes reflecting on the same theme and drawn from different sources.” ⤴️
  • “analysis of the hashtag threads #parallels and #web weaving and case studies of five user accounts” ⤴️
  • “Parallel Posts are symptomatic of a literary culture of digital hyperconnectivity (Brubaker 2020)” ⤴️
  • “curation of media is a key technology of the self (Foucault 1988).” ⤴️
  • “mirroring historical commonplace books.” ⤴️
  • “into literary reception in the digital age” ⤴️
  • “a climactic expression of Tumblr as a site of multimodal, personal, and fannish expression.” ⤴️
  • “experimental digital media-based writing” ⤴️
  • “a story of fragments – a story of how texts, people, and networks are collaged” ⤴️
  • “its development has been a collage of influences.” ⤴️
  • “framed as simultaneously countercultural, subcultural, and trendsetting (Tiidenberg, Hendry, and Abidin 2021; McCracken et al. 2020; Tiffany 2023; Stein 2017), as significant for its impact on the political thinking of Millennials and Gen Zs as it is for the spread of media fandom (Tiffany 2023; Tiidenberg, Hendry, and Abidin 2021; McCracken et al. 2020; Hinkel 2023).” ⤴️
  • “from its affordances through to its user-cultivated culture, it encourages repetition, recitation, remix, and overlap” ⤴️
  • “Tumblr as a site of multimodal literary expression” ⤴️
  • “Parallel Posts can be defined as posts which compile quotes, sometimes including images, relating to the same topic or theme. Their thematic cohesion and formal structure vary: some read as centos, self-contained poems made of lines from other poems; some as collages; some as interrogations of a concept; and others as essays.” ⤴️
  • “collaborative creativity.” ⤴️
  • “How did such a diverse mix of motifs and intertextual references come together?” ⤴️
  • “Parallel Posts (also known as “web weaving”, “comparatives”, or simply “parallels”) have now spread to Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.” ⤴️
  • “They resemble the historical commonplace book or sentiment album to an uncanny extent; they display a distinct literary sensibility and internal subcultural “literary canon”; and they represent one of the only, if not the only, meme formats that is explicitly concerned with literature.” ⤴️
  • “Parallel Posts emerged from a place of intersections, and in this thesis, I argue that the path forward for literary studies in the age of digital hyperconnectivity demands a similarly intersectional and interdisciplinary focus.” ⤴️
  • “what role do Parallel Posts play in collective and individual life on Tumblr,” ⤴️
  • “The digital literary landscape is defined by rapid change; blurred lines between private and public spheres; conflict between old and new media; and a simultaneous over-abundance and artificial limitation of content available (Striphas 2009; Murray 2018; Rowberry 2016; McGurl 2021).” ⤴️
  • “crisis of evolving technologies of language” ⤴️
  • “Parallel Posts are “hypertextual” literary artefacts, as defined by Gérard Genette (1997).” ⤴️
  • “Within transtextuality, a “hypertextual” work is one that derives its manner, plot, themes, or style from another work, the “hypotext” – a hypotext is a source used in a hypertext” ⤴️
  • “from adaptation, parody, and plagiarism to generic similarity, stylistic imitation, and invocation.” ⤴️
  • ““compilation hypertextuality”” ⤴️
  • “Subsections of this collaged form are the request-based” ⤴️
  • “fandom-specific Parallel Posts are inclined towards functioning like small essays or meta- analysis,” ⤴️
  • “Parallel Posts were made and tagged with terms such as “parallels” and “comparatives” before oumaimas began making them. However, oumaimas was the person who gave Parallel Posts their now most-prominent name, “Web Weaving”, through her many 2019 Tumblr posts and her 2019 Medium essay, “My year of practicing tenderness”.” ⤴️
  • “intertextuality as labour, a rejection of “time spent wasting away looking at screens”, self-analysis, openness to a full range of emotions,” ⤴️
  • “This idea of reading material as self-expression is wound through Parallel Posts.” ⤴️
  • “There has been little research on Parallel Posts thus far. They occupy part of Ester Frieder’s 2022 Honours thesis, and I have published two articles on the topic emerging from this thesis (Rose 2023; 2024). Freider takes Parallel Posts (or “Web Weaving”) as part of a broad “nomadic pedagogy” amongst “girlbloggers”, or young, marginalised Tumblr users who share knowledge. Lydia Wei discusses Parallel Posts as “identifiable with the queer community”, due to both the authors and texts most cited and the users who make Parallel Posts most often. Beyond this, Wei argues that through users’ efforts towards “finding queer voices throughout history”, Web Weaving presents an “alternative queer canon” (n.p.). She calls this “a type of excavation”, in which each individual Parallel Post is “an immersive experience of a given emotion” (n.p.).” ⤴️
  • “in Parallel Posts, we see a broad network of bittersweet desire.” ⤴️
  • “this “alternative canon” is of a broader sociological moment” ⤴️
  • “a reorientation of what literary studies may come to “mean” in the digital age, granting equal focus to literary works and to the material, cultural, and political landscapes around them. Murray’s area of study is “the digital literary sphere” (2018), encompassing social sciences methodologies and emphasising the technological, sociocultural, and institutional factors which inform the creation and circulation of literature” ⤴️
  • “I argue that Parallel Posts are as fundamentally fannish as they are bookish, for three key reasons: First, Parallel Posts are transformative works. The Organization for Transformative Works defines a transformative work as that which “takes something extant and turns it into something with a new purpose, sensibility, or mode of expression” (Organization for Transformative Works, n.d., n.p.). Parallel Posts are intertextual transformative works, drawing from different sources to create a whole artefact in the medium of Parallel Posts” ⤴️
  • “Parallel Posts are clearly transformative works.” ⤴️
  • “labours of transformative transtextuality” ⤴️
  • “a performance of cultural capital via engagement with literary work.” ⤴️
  • “a knowledge culture that emphasises self-cultivation, “in direct opposition to formal literary education” and to the “gatekeeping” of literary knowledge (77).” ⤴️
  • “Woolf’s famous figure of the self-driven reader, who “epitomiz[es] enthusiasm as well as autonomous thinking” (68), in “opposition to existing cultural mediators and arbiters of taste” (69).” ⤴️
  • “the platform has been a source of “education” and knowledge-building since its inception.” ⤴️
  • “Tiidenberg, Hendry, and Abidin (2021) call Tumblr “informative, but through education rather than newsy ways” in contrast with other social media platforms (13). They attribute its success in this regard to being “not profile- based or legal name linked”, and largely disconnected from mainstream flows of commerce (13).” ⤴️
  • “On Tumblr, books are situated in a multimodal landscape, where images, audio, video, and text all combine to communicate” ⤴️
  • “Parallel Posts simply condense this multimodal shape into individual posts.” ⤴️
  • “Mike Chasar (2012) has similarly argued that early 20th Century poetry scrapbooks were vital parts of poetry’s life and circulation in that era, with poetry taken as public “commons”;” ⤴️
  • “Evan Hayles Gledhill (2018), too, gestures to older and concomitant practices of commonplace book-keeping, scrapbooking, and curating sentiment albums” ⤴️
  • “Commonplace books, scrapbooks, and sentiment albums are different forms of collaged manuscripts, or manuscripts used to collect quotes from other sources. Through this thesis, I suggest that Parallel Posts are a digital remediation of the collage manuscript form, most poignantly that of the commonplace book,” ⤴️
  • “Comparisons between digital content curation and commonplace books are indeed commonplace: for example, Bob Whipple (2006) views the transition to storing photographs online as a form of commonplacing; Jill Rettberg (2014) presents commonplace books as pre-digital predecessors to Tumblr and Pinterest; Pauline Griffiths (2018) proposes commonplacing through blogs as a tool for school students developing personal voice; and on a broader, interpersonal scale, Simon Rowberry (2016) argues that the use of the “Kindle highlights” feature of the Kindle e- reader, in which users can see others’ highlighted phrases while reading, is akin to a collective commonplacing. Most relevant to this thesis is Gledhill’s (2018) argument that Tumblr as a whole, and specifically fandom on Tumblr, is reminiscent of the commonplace book or sentiment album.” ⤴️

Keep going from here

  • “Parallel Posts welcome the abundance that defines life under “digital hyperconnectivity” (Brubaker 2020) by drawing from many sources, and uniquely, they temper that abundance by fragmenting texts and further connecting them to others.” ⤴️

  • “my methodological framework falls between that of literary analysis and digital ethnography (Ardévol and Gómez-Cruz 2013).” ⤴️

  • “technologies of the self,” ⤴️

  • “Users establish their personal voice and priorities via tagging, much as curators made their commonplace books distinctive resources via indexing. Parallel Posts have become prominent due to the use of shared hashtags such as #parallels, #comparatives, and #poetry, but individuals often tag their posts in personal and complex ways that are legible only when looking at their blogs as unified wholes. The specificity of a user’s tags creates a semi-private sphere of discourse; their followers (or others viewing their blog as a whole) are a closed audience to the way a user interprets and arranges information over time. While the content of each post could be reblogged, the framing and significance of that content to the individual user remains private, contained in their ongoing use of tags.” ⤴️

  • “I excluded for analysis any posts featuring “do not reblog/do not interact” statements.” ⤴️

  • “the transience of online identity, in which the degree of tie between “real” identity and online identity varies user-to-user (see Gerrard 2022). Further, many users will change their usernames and online identities over time, thus making the name at any given moment in time and unstable referent (Gerrard 2022; Busse 2017b; see also Brooker, Duffett, and Hellekson 2017).” ⤴️

  • “Web Weaving as an Anglophone trend.” ⤴️

  • “Parallel Posts present the same concerns around diversity and Eurocentrism that Murray (2023), Adriaansen (2022), and thousands of internet users have discussed with regards to Dark Academia, and further research into Parallel Posts is required to explore their use in more diverse cohorts.” ⤴️

  • “a high degree of literacy, cultural capital, and strong progressive political energy underpinning the work. Whether or not this is reflective of general trends amongst those who make Parallel Posts is unclear;” ⤴️

  • “Participant observation and content analysis were the core methods of this work, but I did not engage in participant interviews, a defining feature of ethnographic work as argued by Ardévol and Gómez- Cruz (2014; see also Cera 2023 and Forberg and Schilt 2023). Of the three main lineages of digital ethnography Ardévol and Gómez-Cruz (2014) outline, my approach aligns most with the media studies-informed “ethnographies of Internet in everyday life” (3), especially as focused on the impact of the digital on the “circuit of culture” and “the rise of a productive audience and the blurring between the spheres of production, distribution, and consumption”” ⤴️

  • “I followed the paths they set through their use of hashtags and their hyperlinking to other sites, tracing the affiliative networks that led to the development of their Parallel Posts.” ⤴️

  • “the Parallel Post as a queer form in itself.” ⤴️

  • “Across these case studies, Parallel Posts mirror commonplace books, particularly as they capture both the analytical processes and emotional experiences of their creators. As Jennifer Lei Jenkins (2015) argues, while commonplace books were initially associated with intellectual development, acting as “antholog[ies] of ideas”, when they spread across classes and genders they took on the role of “album[s] of emotions” (1379). Across ideas and emotions, they “codified curiosity” (1375), and I suggest that curiosity is the outstanding impression across all of these bloggers’ works: Parallel Posts capture processes of inquiry, exploration, and link-making.” ⤴️

  • “These users collectively evidence a central claim of this thesis: that Parallel Posts not only fall into a broader history of curatorial technologies of the self, but into a new category: networked technologies of the self.” ⤴️

  • “much disclosure online is not undertaken with the assumption of it being public, and researchers treating it as such is both disrespectful and dangerous.” ⤴️

  • “self-curation in the context of neoliberal “digital hyperconnectivity” (Brubaker 2020) and argue that Parallel Posts are technologies of the self (Foucault 1988),” ⤴️

  • “Parallel Posts mirror commonplace books and sentiment albums, as filtered through Tumblr’s affordances, subcultures, and unique approaches to multimodality” ⤴️

  • “I suggest that commonplace books, sentiment albums, Tumblr blogs, and Parallel Posts are “curatorial technologies of the self”, in which one self-acculturates and self-performs through textual collage.” ⤴️

  • “use the medium as both a form of essay and of fanfiction.” ⤴️

  • “a unique extension of hyperconnected, fannish, and transformative digital literary culture;” ⤴️

  • “multimodal, intertextual, and persevering influence of Tumblr on broader internet cultures.” ⤴️

  • “Tumblr as a space of “networked technologies of the self”, in which personal and collective experience are intertwined.” ⤴️

  • “Tumblr being a key site of political and social discourse for young people and its extensive influence on broader internet culture (Tiffany 2023; Stein 2017),” ⤴️

  • “user control over the content and layout of their Tumblr was prioritised from the start, with Karp saying, “The magic of Tumblr is we let you put anything in and get it out any way you want” (in McCracken et al. 2020: 4).” ⤴️

  • “Tumblr quickly gained traction as an artists’ and writers’ space, and as a space of media fandom, left-wing activism, and queer, feminist, and broadly counterpublic gathering (McCracken et al. 2020; Tiidenberg, Hendry, and Abidin 2021; Stein 2017; Oakley and Dame-Griff 2020).” ⤴️

  • “2018 “porn ban”, in which all pornographic, sexual, and sex educational material was removed from the site, including vast quantities of queer content that were not “NSFW” (not suitable for the workplace). This disenfranchised Tumblr’s queer and trans userbase and sex workers who used Tumblr professionally (McCracken et al. 2020; Tiidenberg, Hendry, and Abidin 2021).” ⤴️

  • “McCracken et al. (2020) present Tumblr as a diffuse grouping of “disparate people com[ing] together over mutual passions and desires in a queer, carnival-like atmosphere that distinctly dispenses with normalcy” (2). They take Tumblr as “a more egalitarian, nonhierarchical, uncensored media environment” than other mainstream platforms, especially appealing to “those who did not want to be easily surveilled or identified” (5). Anonymity and the possibility for self- performance are taken as integral parts of the site’s affordances.” ⤴️

  • “Tumblr’s “collective imaginary” (McCracken et al. 2020: 60)” ⤴️

  • “imagined as, an online underground […] optimized for secrets and for pseudonyms, which meant it was for art and confession and porn.” ⤴️

  • “Tumblr allows the categorisation of posts through hashtags both internally to a user’s own blog and through the site as a whole.” ⤴️

  • “Stein (2017) argues that specific communities (such as fandoms) deliberately create hashtags that hold meaning only inside their own group, allowing for a “private-in-public” structure of posting (89). Many users, however, use tags discursively or expressively contrary to indexically – at one extreme, posts can be entirely without content, with a user writing “in the tags” instead. Stein notes that tags on Tumblr can be used “to create poetry, analysis, conversation, and even fiction” (89).” ⤴️

  • “The eminence of the reblog leads to McCracken et al.’s (2020) description of Tumblr as “a digital public scrapbook that users collectively create and curate” (5).” ⤴️

  • “reblogging’s prevalence “emphasizes ever-shifting collective authorship and diverse creative communities over individual originality and idea ownership,”” ⤴️

  • ““ambient affiliation”, or the way that a sense of public conversation or shared space can build internal to a digital space, such as a hashtag thread, between people who are not directly connected to one another. The sharing and repetitions of post through different communities leads to a feeling of ambient affiliation, which allows users to perceive Tumblr as a whole and unified community.” ⤴️

  • “Tiidenberg, Hendry, and Abidin (2021) argue that Tumblr’s temporality is highly nonlinear, largely because of the reblog – posts can be continuously circulated for years, alive in the public consciousness; “die” unobserved immediately; or die and be reborn years later. This facilitates a pervasive sense of ephemerality and timelessness (45).” ⤴️

  • “Cho (2015) theorises Tumblr as a temporal and affective space of “queer reverb”, or “refrain that has the additional quality of amplification or diminishment (intensity) through echo”” ⤴️

  • “Tiidenberg, Hendry, and Abidin (2021) call Tumblr’s “vernacular”, which is “multimodal and remix-driven” (47), “curatorial”, and “multiply literate” (46).” ⤴️

  • “Stein (2017) argues, even before Tumblr, fandom’s mode of textual engagement was that of “return, recirculation, and transformative reworking” (87) or “duplication/replication/reiteration” (90).” ⤴️

  • “The reblog feature, and the rolling intertextual communication that the reblog facilitates, allowed for the Parallel Post as a form that multiple users could contribute to. Tumblr’s normalisation of quoted, referenced, and hyperlinked material made a quotational medium a viable trend. The multiple methods of access to Tumblr – personal to the user, specific to another’s blog, or facilitated through the use of hashtags – allowed users to find each other through affiliative networks, through immersion in specific users’ blogs, or through collectivising hashtag threads.” ⤴️

  • “people are most often perceived ephemerally, in reblogged (contrary to original) fragments.” ⤴️

  • “Tiffany (2022) similarly presents curation as a way for users to “collect images and phrases that would help them construct a pretty shadow box of political positions and cultural signifiers” (n.p.). I suggest, then, that the self on Tumblr is harvested and shared through fragments, contrary to performed as a coherent whole.” ⤴️

  • but perhaps in a way hat is more complex and developed - worldbuilding through multimodal lore

  • “fandom, commonplace books, and Parallel Posts, as a triad of interrelated transformative, curatorial practices.” ⤴️

  • “Foucault introduced technologies of the self in 1988, but his work on the hupomnemata (1983) preceded it as an investigation into how people shape and transform their cognition and self- understanding. The hupomnemata was an Ancient Greek antecedent of the commonplace book (Allan 2011), in which the learned were encouraged to reflect on others’ knowledge and their own behaviour, in writing” ⤴️

  • “collecting quotes in a personalised structure.” ⤴️

  • “In the hupomnemata, Foucault (1983) argues, it was insignificant if the curator understood a whole text when quoting it; it was their personal reflection and linking of materials that mattered.” ⤴️

  • “Foucault suggests that through curation, the curator processes, performs, and organises their lived experience, and creates a new whole, rendered on the page – and now, the screen.” ⤴️

  • “External fragments were organised with internal logic to create a new whole, a chorus of disparate voices in the curator’s “tissue and blood” (n.p.).” ⤴️

  • “What is unique in these digital remediations of curatorial quote collection is the influence of networked abundance surrounding them. Rogers Brubaker (2020) argues that the digital present is one of “digital hyperconnectivity”, in which we (we with the privilege of access to technology) are “hypersaturated” with both content and one another (775). Brubaker positions digital hyperconnectivity as a state of being perpetually shown an “inexhaustible storehouse of ‘possible selves’” (775)” ⤴️

  • “digital content curation as vital to processing overwhelming abundance, navigating the social realm,” ⤴️

  • “Parallel Posts are an intensified exercise of self-curation – each is a condensed, and often highly personal, summary of the material that its curator has engaged with.” ⤴️

  • “Eichhorn (2008) was the first scholar to theorise the link between commonplace books and blogging, introducing the term “archival genres” to describe texts that come into being largely through taking from other sources” ⤴️

  • “Archival genres typically feature traits of both essays and diary-writing, but they are also part of the social sphere: commonplace books reflect their curator’s social life, and excerpts from and links to other people’s material” ⤴️

  • “Archival genres exist in the “semi-public sphere […] where individuals are free to voice private concerns and highly subjective standpoints to the public” (8).” ⤴️

  • “Archival genres are texts explicitly positioned in relation to other texts and other members of a text-focused society.” ⤴️

  • “archival genres take on roles of transition between self/other, public/private, and old/new.” ⤴️

  • “Foucault’s (1983) articulation of the hupomnemata as the uniting of text, tissue, and blood.” ⤴️

  • “archival genres are texts that emerge from self-conscious acts of “dwelling” in literature – ruminating on, repeating, and lingering with the reading experience (7).” ⤴️

  • highly subjective and experiential - which is why I’m not considering so-called ‘curation’ implemented by AI. Personal archives only

  • “Deidre Lynch (2018), who posits that commonplace books and sentiment albums are appealing for their “pleasures of discontinuity and anachrony” (107) and express “a desire to halt” (97),” ⤴️

  • “Abigail De Kosnik (2016), who argues that fandom itself is a “resistant temporality” (158) in which creating and consuming fan works are “acts of remembrance” (29; see also Booth 2015; Cho 2015).” ⤴️

  • “a profoundly ruminative genre, both as individual posts and a collective genre, in which themes and texts are repeated and built on near- limitlessly.” ⤴️

  • “digital media’s accessibility has led to a growth in “rogue archives”, archival projects designed by those out of power and without institutional authority. De Kosnik argues that “to archive is to privilege a document” (17); to archive eliminates doubt and provides proof of history, and what is immortalised in the archive is claimed as powerful, as true – thus, to create a rogue archive is to create a counter- canon of culture.” ⤴️

  • “people create “emotional maps of media in order to decide […] which media they will consume and become involved with” (278).” ⤴️

  • “Parallel Posts are both an archival genre and a rogue archive.” ⤴️

  • “combined traits of rogue archiving and archival genres is marked in the development of commonplace books and sentiment albums. The “rogue archival genre”, however, can now be networked,” ⤴️

  • “there remains a sense of cultural capital arising from their very status as counter-cultural and separateness from formal archives.” ⤴️

  • “Brubaker (2020) argues, the defining state of digital life is hyperconnectivity – the constant potential connection to near-infinite content and near-infinite others. Hyperconnectivity has exacerbated the dominant neoliberal ideology of the need to cultivate the self as a cultural object; there have never been more resources from which to self-create – or more, self-curate –” ⤴️

  • “quantification movement or by passively being datafied on social media. Combined with the neoliberal force of self-objectification, the self can always be improved upon in numbers; Brubaker argues “the quantified self is therefore a restless and insatiable self” (784).” ⤴️

  • “framing digital abundance as a burden; they discuss “the tragedy of infinity”, or the fact that “there will always be more books unread than read, more music unheard than heard,” ⤴️

  • “frame personal autonomy, the need to control and curate one’s life and media consumption, as terrifying when hyperconnected to abundance.” ⤴️

  • “the balance Tumblr strikes in granting privacy while simultaneously allowing many modes of self-expression, unbound to linear time or the demand for a” ⤴️

  • “unified self.” ⤴️

  • “This parallels how commonplace books were understood in the age of enlightenment – taking control of the unscalable knowledge available (Dacome 2004; Eichhorn 2008; Jenkins 2015; Lynch 2018).” ⤴️

  • “Users create broad webs of understanding and affiliation through Parallel Posts, entailing both individual reflection and community engagement; rather than performing the self as a coherent whole, Parallel Posts present the self as an intertextual assemblage.” ⤴️

  • “Parallel Posts most often lack personal voice entirely; if a curator uses their own words, it will likely only be in the post’s title or the tags. As per Foucault’s (1983) discussion of the hupomnemata, in Parallel Posts, a curator need not present the whole of a text to take personal value from it; processing and linking information, thereby mingling text, tissue, and blood, is what matters. Parallel Posts demonstrate the intimacy of curation – the user archives not their own words but their own textual experience. Texts are filtered and transformed through the self, even as the curator withholds their voice.” ⤴️

  • “an autobiography of collection, curation, and marginalia.” ⤴️

  • “there are few visuals of books in Parallel Posts; they evoke the physical act of collage, but they simultaneously disembody quotes because of how small they have been cut.” ⤴️

  • “Parallel Posts avoids both the material form of books and the curator’s bodily relationship with the world.” ⤴️

  • “Parallel Posts’ fragmentary nature obfuscates much to do with cultural capital; cultural lines are blurred by a Parallel Posts, as semantic proximity and acuity of phrasing take precedence over equivalence of cultural standing – the differences between texts (forms, eras, formality, status, etc.) are stripped when they are transformed into equivalent snippets.” ⤴️

  • “each user’s content becomes part of a large, fleshy mass of “content” and networked technologies of the self.” ⤴️

  • ““what looks to dim outsiders as some kind of obsession with ‘social justice’ often just springs from people talking about […] their lives” (Ewing in Tiidenberg, Hendry, and Abidin 2021: 137).” ⤴️

  • “Commonplace books are manuscripts or journals used to compile quotes from various sources, whether re-written or cut and pasted. They are often organised with topic words and indexes. Their form and function overlap significantly with scrapbooks, anthologies, and the many curatorial texts which do not fit in any one of these categories (see Zboray and Zboray 2009).” ⤴️

  • “David Allan’s (2011) view that a commonplace book should give “insight” into its “authors as consumers of literature” (26).” ⤴️

  • “The Grecian curatorial practices that led to commonplacing, from the topos to the hupomnemata, developed into Roman rhetorical and oratory tools, then the medieval florilegia, and proliferated widely with Early Modern expansions in literacy. Commonplacing was considered a practice of pedagogical development for students and teachers in the Renaissance; a method of self-teaching religious knowledge for the growing literate classes of protestantism (Allan 2011); and an aspect of self-socialisation to better one’s social conduct and learn one’s own mind in the 18th Century (Dacome 2004).” ⤴️

  • “the commonplace book was framed as a compendium of self-creation, with commonplacing an acceptable “mode of engagement”” ⤴️

  • “in practice, they often hosted such diverse content as recipes, humorous poetry, and family records (Allan 2011; Zboray and Zboray 2009).” ⤴️

  • “commonplacing was often social, with people reading and contributing to others’ commonplace books (Zboray and Zboray 2009; Gledhill 2018).” ⤴️

  • “the sentiment album, a more artistic form of commonplacing that often lacked indexes and references. Sentiment albums arose alongside Romanticism” ⤴️

  • “The cultural understanding of the commonplace book as a tool of auto-didactic self-cultivation was joined by an understanding of sentiment albums as a form of aesthetical, personal self-cultivation. This was a highly gendered paradigm, with sentiment albums considered excessively feminine, frivolous, and lacking critical rigour when compared to commonplace books” ⤴️

  • ““resistant reading”, Gledhill suggests, as marginalised cohorts engage with dominant media landscapes in subversive forms of collage or bricolage:” ⤴️

  • “these transformative practices are not inherently activist practices” ⤴️

  • “Gledhill argues that for a transformative practice to take on political meaning, the cultural script used must be actively subverted rather than recirculated uncritically,” ⤴️

  • “the development of knowledge and self-surety is active and political, and collectively, the links which bind curators together are also political.” ⤴️

  • “She argues against the view of such books as simply “nostalgic” and argues they are self-reflexive and complex memory tools –” ⤴️

  • “18th and 19th Centuries as eras of abundant print codices and contrasts the solidity and (supposed) permanence of the codex form with that of the album, which is non-linear, rejects fixity of meaning, and only plays at the edges of permanence.” ⤴️

  • “The place of sentiment albums as a rogue, if not political, counterpoint to the commonplace book is important to this thesis, as is their historical and gendered marginalisation.” ⤴️

  • “we need to take the sentimental seriously to understand the role of Parallel Posts” ⤴️

  • “their sincere if sentimental determination to reaffirm, in the face of change and loss, the bonds connecting people both to poems and to other people through poems”” ⤴️

  • “emphasis on image- based and affective content sharing, unlinked to offline identity or networks (Cho 2015; Cho 2018; Byron 2019).” ⤴️

  • “Alexander Cho (2018) argues that Tumblr has been taken up as a core site of self-exploration and self-expression by queer youth of colour in large part due to its default privacy, in an age when “default publicness” has been the ruling logic of other leading social media (3184).” ⤴️

  • “Default publicness, links to legal names, and links to offline networks pose significant risks for socially vulnerable people, and such demands are embedded in platform infrastructure and policy.” ⤴️

  • “Akane Kanai (2015) further argues that, if we approach Tumblr as a “remix” space, identity becomes linked to “the borrowing, imitation and adaptation of existing cultural artefacts” (2),” ⤴️

  • “Cho (2015) argues, users are taken as “the sum of [their] posts, which are a visualization of [their] connections to others—a porous, living assemblage” (45; see also Tiidenberg and Whelan 2017).” ⤴️

  • “Parallel Posts are a natural extension of Tumblr’s culture of collage and transformation – they are a climactic form of using transtextuality as indexical to the self.” ⤴️

  • “pulling disparate parts together into new wholes,” ⤴️

  • “the thematic tags create an archive for themselves, comprehensible to themselves, and that this archiving is their primary goal.” ⤴️

  • “Each tag becomes its own self-contained page of an indexed commonplace book,” ⤴️

  • “Figures 12, 13, and 14 show a remediation or skeuomorphism of physical collage, though developed differently – I suggest that Figure 12 was made at least partially in physical form before being uploaded as a digital image, whereas Figures 11 and 13 are born-digital creations” ⤴️

  • “Parallel Posts amplify and uplift specific texts through collective uptake, much as we saw the English Romantic poets circulated through sentiment albums.” ⤴️

  • “Tumblr’s multimodal, fragmentary aesthetics have informed its presence in the public imaginary.” ⤴️

  • “Seko and Lewis dub Tumblr a “fragmented narrative space for self-curation” (182), through which users experiencing mental ill-health develop a “collective intelligence” in shared – reblogged – utterances of the experience of pain.” ⤴️

  • “Users mutually co-create an understanding of their experiences, developing taxonomies and social structures unlinked to medicine.” ⤴️

  • “she often shares Posts without citations, and frames citation as an additional labour to a centrally cathartic project,” ⤴️

  • “The aesthetic drives of Tumblr are those of polyvocal, multimodal collage – as McCracken et al. (2020) put it, Tumblr is “a digital public scrapbook that users collectively create and curate” (5).” ⤴️

  • “the idea of curation of both personal and political identity through collage is wholly resonant with the earlier forms of commonplace books and sentiment albums, from the overlapping roles of curation as personal, social, and educational,” ⤴️

  • “Cho views Tumblr as providing a space for “a possible resistant queer politics rooted in the interplay of cyclical, erotic, and melancholic queer temporalities that linger in a stubborn persistence of the past”” ⤴️

  • “sprawling screenshots taken from Tumblr on Pinterest” (pp.175) ⤴️

  • “parallels:” ⤴️

  • ““a tiring, noisy, manipulative space” in Tumblr’s “collective imaginary” (McCracken et al. 2020: 60).” ⤴️

  • “McCracken, A. Cho, L. Stein, and I. Hoch (eds.) A Tumblr Book. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press: 315-325.” ⤴️

  • “https://www.wired.com/story/end-of-the-tumblr-era/” ⤴️

  • “Stein, Louise E. (2017) ‘Tumblr Fan Aesthetics’, in M. A. Click & S. Scott (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom. Abingdon: Routledge: 86-97.” ⤴️

  • “https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/02/tumblr-internet-legacy- survival/621419/” ⤴️