A bit about the what and why…
Over the years I’ve made a few attempts at webpages and blogs, more or less in keeping with the progress of the social web and the tools available.
Way back when, in grad school in the late 1990s, I built a very basic personal webpage using rudimentary html. I never did any blogging as we know it now; it wasn’t much more than a place for links and photos, and it was hosted on my university’s servers via an ftp upload (yes, for real, ftp) of html code written in a text editor. I ported it over to freeshell (also using basic html and ftp) at some point after leaving Penn and losing my accounts.
For photos I moved on in the very early 2000s to the late great Fotolog, perhaps best renowned for very effusive Brazilians leaving encouraging comments. The Fotolog Wikipedia article says Brazil was among the countries with the most users, so that tracks. I then moved onto Flickr, and am so very pleased at its resurgence, even if I haven’t posted an original photo to it in a while.
Back in the heyday of blogs as we’ve come to know them, the mid-late aughts, I had something up on blogger and did ok finding a voice writing about the things that interested me. Not sure why I let it drop. A year or so ago I received a few messages that posts had to be taken down for some sort of ToS violation. I did go back and fix it, if nothing else for posterity’s sake.
Also on blogger I created a tour diary for the 2014 Slowness European tour. I had my laptop with me and was posting almost every day, trying to recount in recent memory what happened on the tour. That was as much for my memory of it as anything else. Even now when I go back to reading it I am confronted with details that I otherwise might forget. I should probably save those posts to pdf for the if/when google decides to pull the plug.
More recently I started up a data website/blog, to showcase my data analysis and visualization portfolio. It’s made in Quarto and RStudio, hosted on Netlify. The vibe there is more tutorial and showcase. In learning r I have benefitted to much from on-line tutorials and code-throughs that I want to give back a bit. I see from google analytics that people do visit the page, so hopefully it’s helped someone in the way I was helped.
For a while now I’ve been thinking about going back to something more essay-based, and decided that I want to keep it separate from the data portfolio website. Why? Well, the title more or less tells the story.
I’m calling it The Polymath’s Dilemma, the name stemming from my varied set of interests, expertise, and experiences.
So what will this blog be? Well per the title The Polymath’s Dilemma, it will be about a lot of different things. I will likely discuss data analysis and visualization, but in a more meta sense, not the code-through tutorials on my other site. I will write a bit about the benefits and challenges of moving countries, job searching in new countries and contexts. I will also write about the music, movies, and other art that interests me. There may be a post or two on education and public policy, topics that used to be topmost in my mind because of work. There might be memoir-esque posts as I think about events from my life and try to make sense of them in a current context. I may even write about cats (we have two).
In other words, the title defines the subject. I’ll be writing about everything that interests me, and lots of things interest me. The goal is to write about personal interests, thoughts, and experiences, but in a way that hopefully strikes a common and relatable chord.
So what will this blog not be? Again, it won’t copy what I’m doing on my data blog. It won’t be full of too many links, even links to things I’m writing about. Why? Well links go dead and I don’t want my posts to be link graveyards, disappointing people when they click to a dead link. If something I’m writing about interests you enough, it won’t be too hard to find. I’ll leave enough details to give credit to the authors. I’m also not sure how image-laden it will be. Not that I’m opposed to images…I know the web is a visual medium, but it’s also a text medium (I mean, text is in the name of the original web language). I’m writing for myself, to reengage and stretch my writing muscle (I’ve written a dissertation, lots of articles and book reviews, technical reports, and some blog posts). And I’m writing for people who want to read words. And finally, the essays here will not be sourced as if I’m writing a scholarly paper. I’ll give brief credit and explain where I found the information I’m using so you can find what I’m referencing, but again, I don’t want to turn this into a link-farm/graveyard.
Above all I hope to get better at writing. I actually like it, even if it can feel like a slog. The end result is always worth the effort. I hope that my writing improves over time, that I develop a voice and keep readers engaged because you’ve found that I’m conveying personal views in an accessible and relatable manner. I’m also writing longer-form to rehab my brain’s short-attention span created by too much time on Twitter or BlueSky. I need to write and think in more than a couple of hundred characters at a time, or threaded thoughts.
I’m not writing to build an audience, I’m writing to help myself think better about the things that interest me. If that results in an audience, great. If not, it will still be a worthwhile creative outlet for me.
I hope to have about one post a week, but there may be more or less as dictated by time and what’s rattling around my brain. But like anything else, improving at the writing requires the discipline of doing it on a regular basis. Luckily I have a topic list long enough to get me through at least a couple of months or so of weekly posts. But again, I’m interested in lots of things so I hopefully won’t be bereft of topics.
I’ll keep comments and notes open, and hope to get helpful feedback. I’ll also keep the blog free. I’m using Medium for the reach and ease of publishing. And while it would be great to make a bit of coin, I’d rather have the writing out there for whomever wants to read it.
So thanks for reading.
