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The Plate Archive33 charts

Self-Portraits in Bar-Chart Form

The charts where the dataset is the author, and the sample size is one.

Thirty-three charts whose subject is the person who drew them. This is the archive’s default genre, the one an entry falls into when it is not about a film, a song, a platform or a pet, and reading it as a set is the closest thing here to reading a diary kept by several hundred people who never met.

Time, and the failure to use it

PieChart of Procrastination is one of the earliest posts the site ever published and still the most-linked chart in this collection, linked from five sites. It is published as its own plate. Everything that followed in this genre is a variation on it: What I Want To Do All Day, Things To Do Tonight, What to do, How to Decide What to Do, What You’re Doing.

Six charts, all about the gap between intention and afternoon, submitted over four months in 2008 by different readers. None of them is aware of the others. That convergence is the most interesting thing in the collection, an open submission queue producing the same chart repeatedly because the observation is universal and nobody had written it down.

Moods as measurements

Pessimistic Optimist sets a disposition between two poles in its title alone; its image is not among those recovered. Story Of My Life asserts a shape for an entire biography. Fingers Used In Anger is linked from two sites and counts a physical reflex. Times A Joke Is Funny applies the obvious diminishing return to the author’s own material, which is a brave title for a humour site to accept. Its image is not among those recovered.

Quality of a Joke runs the same audit more coldly, and Behavioral Analysis, three links, image lost, announces a methodology for examining oneself and then presumably fails to apply it.

The self-assessment charts

A second group grades the author. What I Can Do and What People Feel About Being Ambidextrous are both skills inventories. Things That Are Said and Things I May Say To Myself are speech records kept about oneself. People to Avoid is a chart that implies a list the author is probably on.

How Stick Figures spend their time is linked from two sites, and is the collection’s one act of displacement: the author draws the chart about a stick figure, which is plainly the author, and the distance makes it funnier rather than safer.

The ones that stop mid-sentence

Eight entries in this collection survive as titles only, and several of those titles are fragments: Weirdness from, React emergency, Songs sad, M. These come from the very end of the archive or from posts whose slug was truncated by whatever linked to them, and what remains is an address, a date and two or three words.

They are kept because that is honestly what the record holds. A collection about self-portraiture ending in a set of half-legible captions is not a failure of the recovery, it is what happens to a diary kept in public on somebody else’s server, and it is the single clearest argument for why the rest of this archive was worth recovering while any of it still could be.

Charts here
33
Images recovered
14
Published as plates
2
Referring domains
45
First posted
Mar 2008
Last posted
Jun 2010

The charts

In publication order. Sides run in tens, the way a record does. A chart marked as a plate has its own page and its own retrospective; the rest are published here, at the addresses they held when they were posted.

  1. A1

    PieChart of Procrastination

    · 5 domains still link here · published as a plate

  2. A2

    Gain, Loss

    · image not recovered

  3. A3

    What It’s Going to Take

    · image not recovered

  4. A4

    People i shot

    · image not recovered

  5. A5

    This day…

    · image not recovered

  6. A6

    Things we talk about

    · image not recovered

  7. A7

    How to Decide What to Do

    · 2 domains still link here

  8. A8

    Number of Times Certain Things Must Happen…

  9. A9

    Things To Do Tonight

    · image not recovered

  10. A10

    Behavioral Analysis

    · Drawn by brooksca · 3 domains still link here · image not recovered

  11. Side B
  12. B1

    What to do

    · Drawn by Blair M

  13. B2

    Who Dies

    · Drawn by Jolt · image not recovered

  14. B3

    Fingers Used In Anger

    · Drawn by R. Dymond · 2 domains still link here

  15. B4

    What I Want To Do All Day

    · Drawn by Robin H

  16. B5

    Things That Are Said

    · Drawn by Ben K · 2 domains still link here

  17. B6

    Times A Joke Is Funny

    · Drawn by howard brinkley · image not recovered

  18. B7

    What People Feel About Being Ambidextrous

    · Drawn by A. Hammer

  19. B8

    How Stick Figures spend their time

    · Drawn by Bloobeard · 2 domains still link here

  20. B9

    People to Avoid

    · Drawn by Ben Brandt

  21. B10

    What You’re Doing

    · Drawn by Miguel G · image not recovered

  22. Side C
  23. C1

    Ways to afterlife according to rock bands

    · Drawn by Mathieu SIVADE · image not recovered

  24. C2

    Pessimistic Optimist

    · Drawn by Amy Tillotson · image not recovered

  25. C3

    Relative Greenness of Grass

    · Drawn by Thomas W · image not recovered

  26. C4

    M

    · image not recovered

  27. C5

    Bringing families together

    · Drawn by wvalverde

  28. C6

    Story Of My Life

  29. C7

    What I Can Do

    · image not recovered

  30. C8

    Quality of a Joke

    · Drawn by Vente1

  31. C9

    Just Who is This Guy?

    · 3 domains still link here · published as a plate

  32. C10

    Weirdness from

    · image not recovered

  33. Side D
  34. D1

    Songs sad

    · image not recovered

  35. D2

    Why I don’t intervene

    · Drawn by TomRed · image not recovered

  36. D3

    React emergency

    · image not recovered

Queries answered

What is in this collection?

Thirty-three charts about the person holding the pen: habits, moods, wasted afternoons and self-assessments, drawn between March 2008 and June 2010. Two are published as their own plates.

Which is the best-known chart here?

PieChart of Procrastination, from March 2008, the fifth chart ever posted to the site and linked from five sites, the highest count in this collection. It is published as its own plate.

Why call them self-portraits?

Because that is structurally what they are. A chart of your own day, drawn by you, with categories you chose, is a portrait made of proportions instead of paint, and like a portrait it tells you more about the choices than about the sitter.

Are these charts honest?

More than the rest of the archive, in one narrow sense: the author had access to the data and no reason to flatter a third party. Several are unflattering in a way a chart about somebody else would not risk.

Why do some entries have no image?

Every original chart image was hosted on a service that no longer serves them, so a surviving copy had to be found for each one. Where none survived, the entry keeps its title, date and address rather than a substitute image.