Written Autobiographical Records—From Experience to Interpreters’ Maps

Abstract

The golden age of memories recorded in written form (e.g., memoirs, diaries, letters) as the best source of biographical information in sociology has come to an end. Since the early 1980s, the number of contests for autobiographical documents has rapidly decreased. In the context of modern social changes, democratization of forms of written record, and the related development of “sociological imagination” there arises a need to “refresh” reflections on several elements of the method of personal documents, which is recognized worldwide thanks to, among others, Florian Znaniecki. This reflection concerns three categories of issues. First, the ethical involvement of phenomenological descriptions in casual and scientific interpretations; second, experience-related and reflective features of an act of creating a record, characteristic for both the researched and the researchers; third, the procedure of mapping written autobiographical records with the use of concept maps. These issues are presented in the article in relation to sociological and non-sociological literature, as social grounding of writing acts crosses disciplinary boundaries. Flexibility, openness, and simplicity of the mapping procedure make both theorists and practitioners from outside the university milieu aware of present possibilities of describing the grounding of human experience in multi-tier but ordered spheres of everyday life.