Create Your Personal Narrative with a Portfolio

The social software market makes me dizzy. I don't have time to test drive every new idea, and it's crazy to have to reinvent a new account and identity for each service. Most services that I try, I just hand back the keys and keep walking, leaving a few crumbs on the carpet. A few have stuck to my windshield, and they do make work and life better and fun - those services I use and very much appreciate. With some services I have a love-hate relationship, like Twitter. In the end, I find my homes-on-the-network mostly by the testimonials and referrals of colleagues and friends because, well, I want to hang out at the same bazaars as they do.

It struck me recently how important these same services could be in more personal ways. Consider: I leave digital artifacts in many places. They're the work of my profession - code, ideas put to business and technical documents, presentations, blogs, email - lots and lots of email (!!!), random notes. They're also the things I produce because I breathe - photographs, more email, more blogs, resumes, random notes - lots and lots of random notes. That's a staggering amount of crap!

Sometimes, especially when I need a little order, I wish for some principle to make order happen. Something like a file cabinet for the random notes, a glass display for showing off the really nice stuff, white walls to hang photographs, a safe for privacy, plans to keep hearth and home safe.

What brings this to mind was a presentation and meeting with scholar and author Darren Cambridge at the IMS Consortium meetings at Penn State. Darren "is fascinated by how people use technology to craft the narratives of their lives". He studies portfolios and how, among other things, they can be used to effect organizational change. All great stuff, with lots of potential for my team and institution as well, but what struck me was more personal. Portfolios are the basic currency of artists and technologists in many fields; why had I forgotten that? Extending the standard idea of portfolio as a body of evidence, he developed the idea of portfolio as a narrative of personal life which connects all the pieces of digital life into a "symphonic self". That's when bells rang.

So, the new tasks at hand: consolidate, narrate, organize, and put a few of the thousands of photographs online. Create my personal cacophony. More on tools for portfolios later. Find out more about Darren Cambridge.

Lessee, where are those taped recordings from my Afro-Cuban-Latin band days? And do I still have that photo of my first cat Ling Mew?