Ok, I did it. A blog. A fieldwork journal. Online. Private. But public otherwise.

This is part of a project I am starting now to display my scientific trajectories publicly. As I am studying online intimacies and the disruption of private/public spheres on the web, I want to make my very epistemological moments intimate, paying attention to what does intimacy mean to my work and how do I relate to it.

The idea started with "A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term", Malinowski's diary entries of his fieldwork that were later published in book format. I have not read it yet (I promise I will), but it seems that the renowned ethnographer had it as a personal task and would never have wanted it to leak.

Malinowski's straightforward passages about his ethnographic inquiry appear as the backstage of science making that no scientist would like to disclose. And this is one of the things I want to do here: to uncover this idea of science as something clean, precise, beautifully delimited and organized, symmetric, aesthetically coordinated, and, mainly, surgically removed and suspended from the daily world of those who make it.

I wanted the page to be libidosciendi.bloghost.com. Libido sciendi is a concept that Latour develops in some of his work that relates to scientists' own desires per knowledge and being certain about things. It sounded like a cool name to put in a blog about desire in online and research settings. But then, of course, all of 'libidosciendi' nice name attempts were already registered in all well-known blog hosts - blogger, wordpress, and tumblr. After much thinking, I thought about adding the 'fi' to the acronym - 'libsci-fi' - to make a link between science and its fictional facet. And voilà.     

The posts here will not follow any general rule: I will post things as I feel the need to. They can be about science issues in general, notes from my ethnographic fieldwork, daily entries about my research routine, random curiosities about my life experiences, and so on. I will try to leave it that way so I can force myself to post more. As I know me, my perfectionist self would never allow me to publish stuff without some careful text structuring. But this is also what I am trying to change - at least about my own mode of being.

Here, I want (and will try) to expose all my trajectory as a scientist and all the dirtiness and uncertainty that comes with this making. I also want to know how does it feel to have things exposed that way. Breaking boundaries is dangerous anyways, for it can lead to unexpected outcomes. I'll take the risk.