{"id":1071,"date":"2017-06-26T17:16:39","date_gmt":"2017-06-26T17:16:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/?p=1071"},"modified":"2017-06-26T17:28:02","modified_gmt":"2017-06-26T17:28:02","slug":"renewing-my-sense-of-purpose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/personal\/renewing-my-sense-of-purpose\/","title":{"rendered":"Renewing my sense of purpose"},"content":{"rendered":"
For years now, about 15 years, my thoughts have circled back to the same theme: storytelling in the mid-21st<\/sup><\/span> century.<\/p>\n I wrote a post about that on our book design blog<\/a> back in 2011. In those days, my former wife and I ran a boutique design studio focused on designing not only books but also apps and websites. She handled the design while I focused on coding the software and building the business. When we started that business in 2005, I made the strategic decision to focus on a niche rather than a broad market of design. Being a general purpose design and development shop would have been too difficult with all the competition. We found our niche and for several years, through effective SEO, was the top search result for \u201cbook design\u201d on Google. I\u2019m proud of SoroDesign but after an eight year run it came time to move on to other ventures. A major part of that was moving back to the U.S. from Argentina. We settled in Virginia, which always has been one of my favorite states. (I had lived in Norfolk from 1995 to 2000.) Now I\u2019m in Lexington, Virginia and have returned to my former profession of librarianship and spend my days as a librarian at Washington and Lee University. More on that in a moment. And my former partner at SoroDesign continues her career as an extraordinary book designer in her role as Senior Designer at the University of Virginia Press. She\u2019s found a professional home in the field of scholarly publishing, which she enjoys very much.<\/p>\n As for me, I\u2019ve always been a non-traditional librarian even though I love books and still strongly believe in the importance of the printed word and that libraries should still build print collections (in addition to all we do digitally). Career-wise, my focus as a librarian always has been digital. I found a solid path within academic librarianship that led to a good, (honestly, a great) career. Throughout the 1990s, I developed a growing interest in what was then called digital libraries. But there was always something in me that lacked interest in the librarian aspect of digital libraries. I was much more interested in how people used digital materials, particularly in how that content was used as a form of expression. In other words, I always was intrigued by the question, “How do you write in digital media?”<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ve written this same essay over and over again<\/a> throughout the years. I\u2019ve talked already elsewhere about how reading Manovich\u2019s The Language of New Media<\/strong> changed my perspective<\/a>. Around 2004, I seriously thought about entering a PhD program in what would now be called digital humanities but that term hadn’t yet gained momentum. I was highly influenced by the writings of Janet Murray and Katherine Hayles<\/a>. Yet, a romantic relationship and a newly emerged impulsive tendency prompted me to abandon my career at age 39 and move to Buenos Aires where I adopted a lifestyle of enjoying life and working to live rather than living to work. We formed SoroDesign that year (2005) and I started this blog that same year, though I\u2019ve been very sporadic in my postings over more than a decade.<\/p>\n