Diaries and Calendars
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Wikipedia-Article "Diaries"
- See Diary (novel) for the novel by Chuck Palahniuk and Diary (album) for an album by Sunny Day Real Estate
A diary is a book for writing discrete entries arranged by date. It can be used for recording in advance of appointments and other planned activities, and/or for reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. Such logs play a role in many aspects of human civilization, including governmental, business, and military records. Diaries run the spectrum from business notations, to listings of weather and daily personal events, through to inner exploration of the psyche, or a place to express one's deepest self. Some use the words "diary and "journal" interchangeably while others apply strict differences to journals, diaries and journaling - dated, undated, inner focused, outer focused, forced, etc.
Some diarists think of their diaries as a special friend, even going so far as to name them. For example, Anne Frank called her diary "Kitty". There is a strong psychological effect of having an audience for one's self-expression, a personal space, or a "listener," even if this is the book one writes in, only read by oneself.
More than 16,000 diaries have been published since book publishing began. See List of diarists.
Additionally, the diary is a popular form for works of fiction. See List of fictional diaries.
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History
The word diary comes from the Latin diarium ("daily allowance", from dies, "day" - more often in the plural form diaria). The word "journal" comes from the same root (diurnus = of the day) through "journey".
The oldest extant diaries come from East Asian cultures, pillowbooks of Japanese court ladies and Asian travel journals being some of the oldest surviving specimens of this genre of writing.
Sales of "page a day" diaries go back hundreds of years (Letts, for example, is over 200 years old). At first, most of these books were used as ledgers, or business books. Samuel Pepys is the earliest diarist that is well known today, although he had contemporaries who were also keeping diaries. (John Evelyn for one.) Pepys also was apparently at a turning point in diary history, for he took it beyond mere business transaction notation, into the realm of the personal.
Until, it seems, around the turn of the 20th century, with greater literacy and industrialization throughout the globe, particularly the Western world, diary writing was mostly limited to the members of the higher socio-economic classes. In the West, at least, a high proportion of historical and literary figures from the Renaissance to the 20th century seem to have kept a diary. (see list below)
In the 1960s Tristine Rainer authored the book The New Diary. It was revolutionary in expanding awareness of diary-keeping as a literary genre. In the work she identified techniques that people use either spontaneously or have employed in their daily writing to explore themselves and their experience of the world in which they live. The idea, as expressed in the title, is that a diary is much more than a dry record of weather or daily events--it allows the writer to communicate deep and often spiritual realizations.
One of the most tempting things about diaries is that writing one is accessible to anyone with pen and paper. No education is needed. One doesn't need to know how to spell or use grammar. Writing a diary is something some people are driven to do, often as a way to put their existence into perspective. Too often the modern Western stereotype is that diaries are written only by teenage girls. The onslaught of diaries sold in "cute" colors with locks and keys helped this illusion. Now, many people prefer the word "journal" so as to avoid this common misconception.
Diaries/journals and healing
In the 1980s and 1990s diaries or journals became fertile ground for therapy. Many books have been published about how to write a diary (for increasing "self-awareness," for "finding your true self," and for healing from any number of personal troubles, including physical illness and trauma). An entire culture has evolved around the practice of journaling. There are many techniques to be attempted. (Many of these techniques enjoyed their first mention in Tristine Rainer's book.)
Internet diaries
As Internet access became commonly available, people naturally adopted it as yet another medium with which to chronicle their lives, with the added dimension of having an audience (negating, to some, the very definition of "diary"). Apart from the odd tangent on USENET and posts to proprietary forums on the earliest Internet service providers, the first online personal diary is believed to be that of Carolyn Burke, which debuted on the web in January 1995. The number of people publishing web journals grew quickly, but for some time the practice was limited to people who had both internet access and a familiarity with HTML. However, several diverse communities of web diarists eventually developed.
Blogs
Easy-to-use web-based services soon appeared to make online publishing easier. But the great explosion in personal storytelling came with the emergence of weblogs, also known as blogs. While the format was at first focused on external links and topical commentary, widespread weblog tools were quickly seized upon to create web journals - albeit consisting of short, spontaneous entries rather than crafted essays. Further, the weblog community was more naturally comfortable with networking and linking, creating a thriving online community. Much like the web diarist community that came before, there were cliques and protests over a supposed A-list of authors. Like online journals, "personal weblogs" are frequently maligned in the broader web log community as a form of "navel gazing."
Some weblog services are small and merely offer a way to publish one's writing, while others have become true communities offering opportunities for feedback and communication with fellow diarists. While many of the people using these online communities are presumed to be teenage girls and young people, (who perhaps see them as a way to keep their inner thoughts secret from their families while expressing and exploring their feelings and the experience of growing up), there is a fair amount of evidence that the stereotype is fading with the growing prevalence of journals and weblogs on the internet.
Online services
Some "online diary" websites providers:
- Aeonity
- BCZ Blogs
- Blogger
- Diarist
- Diaryland
- Diary-X
- LiveJournal
- Xanga
- HotDiary
- Monkeybard
- Open Diary
- Travel-Diaries
- Health Diaries
- Diary IS
- Blog Spot
- Exteen
- StoryThai
See also
External links
Wikipedia-Article "Calendars"
A calendar is a system for naming periods of time, typically days. These names are known as calendar dates. The dates may be based on the perceived motion of astronomical objects. A calendar is also a physical device (often paper) that illustrates the system (for example, a desktop calendar) — this is the most common usage of the word.
As a subset, 'calendar' is also used to denote a list of particular set of planned events (for example, court calendar).
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Calendar systems
Calendars in use on Earth are lunar, solar, lunisolar or arbitrary.
A lunar calendar is synchronized to the motion of the Moon (moon phases); an example is the Islamic calendar.
A solar calendar is based on perceived seasonal changes synchronized to the apparent motion of the Sun; an example is the Persian calendar.
A lunisolar calendar is synchronized both to the motion of the Moon and to the apparent motion of the Sun; an example is the Jewish calendar.
An arbitrary calendar is not synchronized to either the Moon or the Sun; examples are the week and the Julian day used by astronomers.
There are some calendars that appear to be synchronized to the motion of Venus, such as some of the ancient Egyptian calendars; synchronization to Venus appears to occur primarily in civilizations near the Equator.
Solar calendars
Main article: Solar calendar
Days used by solar calendars
Solar calendars assign a date to each solar day. A day may consist of the period between sunrise and sunset, with a following period of night, or it may be a period between successive events such as two sunsets. The length of the interval between two such successive events may be allowed to vary slightly during the year, or it may be averaged into a mean solar day. Other types of calendar may also use a solar day.
Future reform
There have been a number of proposals for reform of the calendar, such as the World calendar and International Fixed Calendar. The United Nations considered adopting such a reformed calendar for a while in the 1950s, but these proposals have lost most of their popularity.
Lunar calendars
Main article: Lunar calendar
Not all calendars use the solar year as a unit. A lunar calendar is one in which days are numbered within each moon phase cycle. Because the length of the lunar month is not an even fraction of the length of the tropical year, a purely lunar calendar quickly drifts against the seasons. It does, however, stay constant with respect to other phenomena, notably tides. A lunisolar calendar is a lunar calendar that compensates by adding an extra month as needed to realign the months with the seasons. An example is the Jewish calendar which uses a 19 year cycle.
Lunar calendars are believed to be the oldest calendars invented by mankind. Cro-Magnon people are claimed to have invented one around 32,000 BC.
Fiscal calendars
Main article: Fiscal calendar
A fiscal calendar (such as a 5/4/4 calendar) fixes each month at a specific number of weeks to facilitate comparisons from month to month and year to year. January always has exactly 5 weeks (Sunday through Saturday), February has 4 weeks, March has 4 weeks, etc. Note that this calendar will normally need to add a 53rd week to every 5th or 6th year, which might be added to December or might not be, depending on how the organization uses those dates. There exists an international standard way to do this (the ISO week). The ISO week runs Monday through Sunday and Week 1 is always the week that contains January 4 Gregorian.
Calendar subdivisions
Nearly all calendar systems group consecutive days into "months" and also into "years". In a solar calendar a year approximates Earth's tropical year (that is, the time it takes for a complete cycle of seasons), traditionally used to facilitate the planning of agricultural activities. In a lunar calendar, the month approximates the cycle of the moon phase. Consecutive days may be grouped into other periods such as the week.
Because the number of days in the tropical year is not a whole number, a solar calendar must have a different number of days in different years. This may be done with leap years. The same applies to months in a lunar calendar and also the number of months in a year in a lunisolar calendar. This is generally known as intercalation. Even if a calendar is solar, but not lunar, the year cannot be divided entirely into months that never vary in length.
Cultures may define other units of time, such as the week, for the purpose of scheduling regular activities that do not easily coincide with months or years.
Other calendar types
Complete and incomplete calendars
Calendars may be either complete or incomplete. Complete calendars provide a way of naming each consecutive day, while incomplete calendars do not. The early Roman calendar, which had no way of designating the days of the winter months other than to lump them together as "winter", is an example of an incomplete calendar, while the Gregorian calendar is an example of a complete calendar.
Pragmatic, theoretical and mixed calendars
Calendars may be pragmatic, theoretical, or mixed.
A pragmatic calendar is one that is based on observation; examples are the religious Islamic calendar and the old religious Jewish calendar in the time of the Second Temple. Such a calendar is also referred to as an observation-based or astronomical calendar. The advantage of such a calendar is that it is perfectly and perpetually accurate. The disadvantage is that working out when a particular date would occur is difficult.
A theoretical calendar is one that is based on a strict set of rules; an example is the current Jewish calendar. Such a calendar is also referred to a rule-based or arithmetical calendar. The advantage of such a calendar is the ease of working out when a particular date occurs. The disadvantage is imperfect accuracy. Furthermore if the calendar is very accurate, its accuracy perishes slowly over time owing to changes in Earth's rotation. This limits the lifetime of an accurate theoretical calendar to a few thousand years. After then, the rules would need to be modified from observations made since the invention of the calendar, resulting in a mixed calendar.
A mixed calendar combines the features of both pragmatic and theoretical calendars. Mixed calendars usually begin as theoretical calendars, but are adjusted pragmatically when some type of asynchrony becomes apparent; the shift from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar is such an example.
The Gregorian calendar, as a final example, is complete, solar, and mixed.
Uses
The primary practical use of a calendar is to identify days: to be informed about and/or to agree on a future event and to record an event that has happened. Days may be significant for civil, religious or social reasons. For example, a calendar provides a way to determine which days are religious or civil holidays, which days mark the beginning and end of business accounting periods, and which days have legal significance, such as the day taxes are due or a contract expires. Also a calendar may, by identifying a day, provide other useful information about the day such as its season.
Calendars are also used as part of a complete timekeeping system: date and time of day together specify a moment in time. In the modern world, written calendars are no longer an essential part of such systems, as the advent of accurate clocks has made it possible to record time independently of astronomical events.
Currently used calendars
Calendars in widespread use today include the Gregorian calendar, which is the de facto international standard, and is used almost everywhere in the world for civil purposes, including in China and India (along with the Indian national calendar). The Hebrew calendar is the official calendar of Israel's government, but the Gregorian calendar is much more widely used in Israel's business and day-to-day affairs. The Persian calendar is used in Iran and Afghanistan. The Islamic calendar is used by Muslims the world over. The Chinese, Hebrew, Hindu, and Julian calendars are widely used for religious and/or social purposes.
Even where there is a commonly used calendar such as the Gregorian calendar, alternate calendars may also be used, such as a fiscal calendar.
See also
- List of calendars
- Gregorian calendar
- Julian calendar
- liturgical year
- calendar of saints
- Christian calendar
- Eastern Orthodox Church calendar
- Calculating the day of the week
- Cycles
- Runic calendar
- French Republican Calendar
- Wall calendar
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Calendars
- Zoroastrian calendar
- iCalendar
- hCalendar
- Calendar reform
Sources
- Calendrical Calculations; Nachum Dershowitz and Edward M. Reingold; Cambridge University Press, 1997; ISBN 0-521-56474-3; Book Info; Online Calculator
- Mapping Time, the calendar and its history; E G Richards; Oxford University Press, 1998; ISBN 0-19-850413-6
- A comparative Calendar of the Iranian, Muslim Lunar,and Christian Eras for Three Thousand Years; Ahmad Birashk; Mazda Publishers, 1993; ISBN 0-939214-95-4
- The Comprehensive Hebrew Calendar; Arthur Spier; Feldheim Publishers, 1986; ISBN 0-87306-398-8
- High Days and Holidays in Iceland; Árni Björnsson; Mál og menning, 1995; ISBN 9979-3-0802-8
- Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac; P. Kenneth Seidelmann, ed.; University Science Books, 1992; ISBN 0-935702-68-7; Chapter 12: Calendars by L. E. Doggett
- Sun, Moon, and Sothis; Lynn E. Rose; Kronos Press, 1999; ISBN 0-917994-15-9
- Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Tibetischen Kalenderrechnung; Dieter Schuh; Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH, 1973
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