The lens I am bringing to this project has become clearer to me only through the process of building it. I initially understood Is It Time? primarily as a project about migration and temporality: how repeated movement between geographically distant places changes one’s relationship to past, present, future, and home. I still think that is its central subject, but I now see the project less as an attempt to explain migration than as an experiment in assembling different forms of knowledge without forcing them into a single coherent account.

This distinction has become increasingly important to me. My project contains materials that behave very differently from one another. A flight record gives me precise information: date, airport, flight number, departure time, arrival time, duration, direction. A journal entry records something less stable. A photograph freezes one instant but may acquire completely different meanings years later. A painting collapses several places and periods of my life into the same visual plane. Music operates differently again, existing only as it unfolds through time. Instead of asking which of these documents the experience most accurately, I have started asking what each one is capable of knowing.

María Eugenia Cotera’s idea of “fleshing the archive” has been especially helpful in thinking through this. Cotera argues for approaching archives not simply as stable collections of evidence but as sites of encounter, bringing documentary materials into conversation with oral histories, personal collections, embodied memory, affect, and lived experience. What interests me most is the refusal to establish a strict hierarchy in which institutional documents automatically count as historical knowledge while personal objects or memories are treated as supplementary. Cotera describes personal archives containing not only manuscripts and correspondence but T-shirts, family photographs, dried flowers, awards, and other everyday objects that might never enter an institutional collection.

This has changed how I think about the materials in my own project. I originally imagined that my flight database would provide the analytical foundation, while the painting, journal entries, sketches, and music would make the project more personal or atmospheric. Now I am less interested in maintaining that distinction. The spreadsheet does not necessarily know more than the journal, it just knows differently. The flight record can tell me exactly how long UA862 remained in the air, but my memory can tell me why those twelve hours felt suspended between two lives. Neither source replaces or should replace the other.

Elijah Gaddis’s discussion of fragments has pushed this idea further. In Gruesome Looking Objects, Gaddis deliberately resists reconstructing fragments into a seamless historical whole. He argues that the appearance of completeness can itself conceal other possibilities for understanding, and treats fragments as meaningful things rather than merely incomplete pieces waiting to be repaired. I find this particularly useful because my project is fundamentally fragmentary: several flights, one painting, selected journal passages, photographs, memories, sounds. There is no reason these materials should add up to a definitive account of migration.

The practical development of the project has unexpectedly reinforced this perspective. For my archive of French summer study abroad section, I first organized memories as individual items in Omeka: photographs, journal excerpts, sketches, places, and other fragments, each contained within the clean boxes of a database entry. But the tabular structure felt too orderly for the way I actually remember that period. Memory does not return to me chronologically or according to metadata fields. One image leads to a place, which leads to a conversation, which leads to another image from several days later. The connections are associative rather than linear.

To respond to this, I built a node-based graphic view of the France archive. Instead of presenting the materials as a sequence of records, the visualization places them within a web of relationships. Individual memories become nodes connected through shared places, people, objects, themes, or associations, allowing viewers to move through the archive along multiple possible paths. In this form, the archive begins to imitate the structure of memory itself: dispersed, interconnected, and capable of being entered from many different points.

Building this view changed how I understood the project intellectually. I had initially treated the Omeka archive as the underlying “real” structure and the visualization as another way of displaying it. I now think the relationship is more complicated. The tabular archive and the node graph produce different understandings from the same materials. One emphasizes classification, retrievability, and efficient accessibility; the other emphasizes association, proximity, and unexpected connection. The node view therefore does not simply make the archive more visually interesting, it actively de-linearizes it, allowing fragments to form what Gaddis might describe as constellations of meaning rather than resolving them into one explanatory narrative.

For a public audience, I hope the project encourages viewers to think about their own relationships to movement, memory, and ordinary objects. Someone does not need to share my experience of international migration to understand the strange significance that a plane ticket, photograph, familiar song, or repeated route can acquire. I would rather the viewer leave thinking about their own archives than simply learning facts about mine.

For a scholarly audience, I hope the project demonstrates the value of placing quantitative, artistic, sensory, and autobiographical materials beside one another without requiring one to authenticate the others. I am interested in what happens when visualization becomes not merely a means of clarifying information but a way of exposing its limits.

There are several directions I would like to develop further. One is body time: jet lag, hunger, sleep, daylight, and the difference between what the clock says and what the body experiences. Another is participation - the project could eventually include contributions from other migrants—routes, photographs, sounds, objects, or fragments of memory, so that the painting becomes less a map of one biography than an expanding archive of temporal displacement.

Most of all, I want to continue exploring whether a digital archive can preserve fragmentation rather than eliminate it. Instead of using technology to make experience perfectly organized and legible, I find more meaningful in whether it can make room for contradiction, absence, uncertainty, and things that refuse to fit neatly together.