Look! The book I was working on all spring has a cover, I’ve got till Tuesday to go through the proofs, and it will be published by Palgrave in less than a month! You can preorder it at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com right now, or wait a few weeks until the open access digital version is available.

I am really excited about this book. It’s about self-representations in digital media, which is a topic I’ve been thinking about and writing about for several years. Of course blogs are part of this, but in this book I wanted to understand digital self-representation in a much broader manner, and so I look at three modes of self-representation that each has a long history, but that are often intertwined in today’s digital culture:

1. Written self-representations like blogs, tweets and a lot of what happens on platforms like Facebook and Tumblr.
2. Visual self-representations like selfies, profile pictures on Facebook and Instagram feeds.
3. Quantitative self-representations generated by activity trackers, calorie trackers, productivity trackers, to do lists and so on.

Each chapter has an abstract, as the chapters will be available for individual download as well as all together as a book. Here’s the proof of the abstract of the first chapter:

In working with this material I’ve become particularly fascinated with the ways in which machines are increasingly writing our diaries for us, whether through automated cameras like the Narrative Clip, through the wearable devices that allow the quantified self movement to generate visualizations and analyses that help them improve their lives, or by the automated data gathering performed by apps like Swarm, Moves or OptimizeMe, web services like Facebook or Google or our phone service providers and marketers.  The book thus moves from looking at digital self-representations in general to considering the relationships between people and machines, and lives and data in a much broader manner.

Here is the table of contents:

And it will be out in about a month!