Lynn Chiu, PhD

What is the purpose of this site?

It's high time to future-proof our files.

Digital decay* is happening rapidly. There is no guarantee that content hosted in different blogs and social media will last or remain accessible. To save a future-proof copy of my work & reclaim ownership over how they are presented online, I'm in the process of collecting and converting my writings -- research, scicomm, relevant social media threads etc -- into Obsidian Markdown files. They are then published on this minimalist blog via some API handshaking. Alas, images are not that easy to preserve and host at the moment, so some may eventually fail.

There's a deep, emotional aspect to this practice of gathering, annotating, coding (I use a few Python scripts to clean up the files, tag them behind the scenes, cross-link them, and make API calls), preserving. It feels like the digital equivalent of harvesting, husking, of spinning, of weaving, of smoking, drying, and canning.

Mayhaps... this elder Millennial is just feeling old-timely and nostalgic about old-school ways and old-school internet. But more likely, it's my way to properly acknowledge change. By capturing parts of processes in neatly labelled capsules, I wish for them to become repurposed in the ride forward. This is an act of letting go without forgetting.

References