{"title":"Our “Baby” on YouTube: The Gendered Life Stories of the Unborn","authors":"A. Pelage","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.8.35666","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.8.35666","url":null,"abstract":"This study concerns the usage of foetal ultrasounds, more specifically those produced during the 5th month of pregnancy within the routine checks of any pregnancy in France. Interestingly, more and more parents are posting short films on YouTube of their baby-to-be using the medical images produced during such antenatal examinations. This study therefore analyses a set of 108 YouTube posts among the thousands available to understand the social implications of such posts on the unborn. Uncannily, it appears that these videos constitute not only the first pages of the biographies of a girl or a boy but also the autobiographical tales of a mother or father waiting for the birth of a daughter or son. The close reading of 31 archetypical videos reveals how those who post such videos see 5th-month ultrasound imagery as a means for them to prepare, not just for the birth of a child, but for the birth of a girl or a boy and simultaneously to prepare to become, not just parents, but the father or mother of a son or a daughter.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"78 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116759181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Under Construction” Lives: Restorative Nostalgia and the GeoCities Archive","authors":"Sarah McRae","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.8.35623","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.8.35623","url":null,"abstract":"A website called the “Geocities-izer” appeared in 2010, presaging the new decade’s growing appetite for 1990s-era cultural artifacts, an appetite that encompasses the digital aesthetic from that era.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124955810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Elena Ferrante in The Guardian and Roads and Kingdoms","authors":"Alisa Miller","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.8.35610","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.8.35610","url":null,"abstract":"https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/elena-ferrantes-weekend-column Elena Ferrante has, in recent years, become a sensation in the UK—and internationally—as readers discover her writings, particularly her Neapolitan quartet of novels. These focus on the lives of two women: their relationships with their city, families, friends, co-workers and, most importantly, one another. For some time after the novels became available in English in late 2012, many conversations about books, or life and culture in general, would circle around the question: ‘Have you read My Brilliant Friend…?’ \u0000roadsandkingdoms.com Roads and Kingdoms is a travel website and online publication. In some ways it fits standard expectations of the genre, offering up city guides and more general recommendations about the best places to eat and stay. But the longer articles, commissioned from writers based around the world who approach their subjects from a variety of creative narrative angles, are unusually nuanced and reflective.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"46 24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124182185","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Multilingual Full-Text Database of Overseas Life-Writing on Modern Chinese People and the China Biographical Database","authors":"Rong Huang","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.8.35611","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.8.35611","url":null,"abstract":"http://sclw.lib.sjtu.edu.cn/index The Multilingual Full-Text Database of overseas life writing on Modern Chinese People (the Database) was launched by the Centre for life writing at shanghai Jiao Tong University (sJTU) in november 2011. all subjects in the Database are influential, representative, or exemplary Chinese people whose life materials are either published or preserved outside mainland China after 1898, the year generally considered to be the beginning of China’s Modern age. The Database aims to bring a prosopographical perspective to the transnational and transcultural experience shared by a rather large number of Chinese people in the previous century. by april 2018, the Database has listed more than 3,000 subjects and over 15,000 relevant resources. \u0000https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdbThe China Biographical Database (CBDB) is a large data aggregator and powerful content harbour co-developed by Harvard University, Academia Sinica, and Peking University. It is one of the oldest and biggest digital humanities projects focusing on China. In its latest data release in August 2017, CBDB contains biographical information about 417,000 Chinese individuals, mostly from the 7th century to the 19th century. Unlike many text-based databases, CBDB does not preserve primary life materials in the original textual sources. Rather, it mines texts from digital sources of reliable historical records and stores them in a relational database. ","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130085069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What We Wore and Sketchfab","authors":"R. Gallagher","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.8.35607","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.8.35607","url":null,"abstract":"http://what-we-wore.com/ Maintained by photographer and curator Nina Manandhar, What We Wore describes itself as ‘a people’s style history of Britain’. I first encountered it on Tumblr, but in the past five years the project has spread to other social media platforms, spawned a coffee table book, exhibitions and workshops and given rise to spin-off devoted to the sartorial history of London’s seedily bohemian Soho. In a sense, its appeal is straightforward: other people’s photo albums always contain marvels, and the stories and images collected here are often fantastically evocative. https://sketchfab.com/moving_past_present This link leads to a profile page on Sketchfab, a database of 3D models and animation files. The files hosted there are the result of a collaboration between artist Janina Lange and King’s College London’s Strandlines project.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133246567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Facebook R.I.P. Group and Charlotte Eades' Video Diary","authors":"K. Giaxoglou","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.8.35613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.8.35613","url":null,"abstract":"The public Facebook R.I.P. group was created in 2012 as a tribute to a young adult aged 18, who died in a car crash just eleven days before his school graduation. His classmates created this Facebook memorial group as a way of extending socially, spatially and temporally the memorials and vigils held in the community immediately after his passing. The different tributes flooding the memorial wall attest to individual moments of remembrance in the here-and-now, recording personal reactions, thoughts and feelings about their loss; in the process, this community of mourners is collectively (re)writing the life of their dead friend as a life worthy of being mourned and celebrated. \u0000Charlotte Eades' Video Diary: this compelling video diary of living with terminal illness renders tellable and visible not only the ‘small’ and ‘big’ battles with cancer, but also the everydayness of life with and despite dying.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131198891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spare Rib and Underwater Livecams","authors":"C. Brant","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.8.35615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.8.35615","url":null,"abstract":"https://www.bl.uk/spare-rib Digital citizens of the future may have sorted a gender politics which works for everybody. A utopian hope, yes; in case not, and in any case, I would want them to know that in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, there was a worldwide women’s movement full of daring thinkers and brave activists. So often history is written by the victors; web resources at least prolong the availability of alternative versions. What’s known as second wave feminism worked largely through print and word of mouth, but is now partially recuperable through podcasts, oral history and digital archives. Spare Ribe was a polemical, practical monthly magazine published in Britain from 1972 to 1993. It’s available again, newly digitised at the British Library. Underwater Livecams. I like to imagine that future netizens will know more about the oceans than we do. But they should know that some of their predecessors are passionately curious about life underwater, and that there were webcams which livestreamed from depths no human had seen before.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"216 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122884195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Into the Gloss","authors":"Felice McDowell","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.8.35609","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.8.35609","url":null,"abstract":"‘The Top Shelf’ and ‘#ITGToPSHELFIE’ are both webpages of the beauty/ fashion blog ‘Into the Gloss’ (ITG), founded by Emily Weiss in 2010. I have chosen to consider two pages from the same site as the ways in which they are similar and different present another instance of how digital fashion media participates in the fashioning of life. Although men have appeared on both pages, I have focused upon the blogs’ female participants.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125433912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Thingiverse: Archive and Enabler","authors":"Uk Hurley","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.8.35622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.8.35622","url":null,"abstract":"Thingiverse is an open-source website, showcasing the capabilities of 3D printers (https://www.thingiverse.com/). Hosted by Makerbot Industries, one of the largest manufacturers of 3D printers, the site encourages users to share designs under a Creative Commons license. In excess of one million designs have been uploaded to date, ranging from the practical to the frivolous. Blueprints for customisable prosthetic limbs are shared alongside cup-holders and mischievous re-workings of well known cartoon characters. The site is structured like a fairly standard online community, with professional curators and peer-to-peer comment, with no restrictions on use beyond what is legal.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"150 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120939170","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Yumi Sakugawa's Instagram Account and Erika Lust's Erotic Films","authors":"Emma Maguire","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.8.35606","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.8.35606","url":null,"abstract":"Yumi Sakugawa is an illustrator and comics artist based in Los Angeles and she has been using her Instagram account to experiment with digital self-help. These experiments build on Sakugawa’s previous work in print comics and her millennial guides to improving the self, such as Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe (2014) and the Little Book of Life Hacks (2017). She uses smartphone tools like note-taking and messaging apps to create mindfulness and meditation exercises, delivered on the platform of Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/yumisakugawa/ \u0000Erika Lust makes multi-lingual erotic films using a sex-positive feminist approach and is based in Barcelona. What I’m really interested in, in terms of life narrative, is her XConfessions series. XConfessions is built around a forum-based online community in which women share their fantasies. Lust then turns these fantasies into erotic films. Lust makes women’s sexuality, experience and desire the center of her filmmaking practice, and she adapts the confessional mode for feminist and commercial purposes. https://xconfessions.com \u0000 \u0000 ","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"146 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116487754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}