Reviving the Miscellany: Anthology/Matt as a Twenty-First-Century Memex
Matthew Shadbolt’s Anthology/Matt domain appears, at first glance, to be a neatly‑partitioned portfolio of writing—film criticism, academic essays, and semi‑fictional vignettes. Yet when you look beneath the UI veneer, the site reveals itself as a contemporary revival of a much older textual technology: the early‑modern miscellany and its successor, the commonplace book. Reading Anthology/Matt through that genealogy lets us see the site not merely as a personal content hub but as a living laboratory for digital curation, one that quietly rehearses the epistemic ambitions Vannevar Bush sketched for the now‑mythic memex in 1945. Understanding this lineage not only enriches our appreciation of Shadbolt’s craft but also clarifies why the project feels so strangely capacious—why it can host papers on Zoroastrian funerary towers alongside speculative EastEnders multiverses without ever seeming incoherent.
Shadbolt signals the site’s curatorial self‑awareness the moment you enter the Labs section; the header bluntly declares that “It’s a Daily Operation,” framing content creation as an ongoing experimental process rather than a sequence of polished end‑products. The phrase revives the eighteenth‑century miscellany’s privileging of varietas over perfection: miscellanies were intentionally heterogeneous, designed to capture the fluid pulse of contemporary taste rather than to fix a canonical record. Scholars of the form note that, unlike anthologies, miscellanies judge value by the collective energy of juxtaposition, not by individual textual excellence. Shadbolt’s trifold navigation (“Film Criticism,” “Academic Papers,” “Semi‑Truths & Stories”) therefore functions less as strict genre demarcation and more as a curator’s shelving system—a way to stage productive collisions among essays on Pericles’ Funeral Oration, Joy Division’s filmic afterlives, and radio‑friendly meditations on Radiohead.
The Academic Papers shelf crystallises this principle. Scroll a single screen and you leap from “Zheng He’s Giraffe” to “Liminal, Loathing & Leveling‑Up: The Biological Inevitability of Monstrosity,” from Vedic ritual neurology to Brexit field guides. Such adjacency echoes the miscellany’s historical role as a vehicle for “submerged voices and marginal writing,” where recipes cohabited with lyric poems and legal briefs with bawdy ballads. By re‑creating that kaleidoscopic arrangement online, Shadbolt invites readers to discover patterns that formal disciplinary taxonomies typically obscure—precisely the associative logic Bush championed when he imagined a desk‑sized machine that would let a scholar thread “trails of links” through disparate documents.
Bush’s memex has become a totem for digital‑humanities origin stories, yet its prophetic force lay less in technological detail than in the curatorial model it proposed: knowledge would accelerate only when individuals could collect, annotate, and share their own database of fragments. Anthology/Matt approximates that model in three subtle ways. First, the About footer cross‑links five sibling domains—Artificial, Academic, Archival, Arclight, and Anthology—into a slash‑brand constellation that mimics Bush’s “mesh of associative trails,” allowing any given artefact (a Destiny raid exegesis, an NBC product‑management memo, a photo‑remixed Joy Division poster) to be situated simultaneously in aesthetic, scholarly, or professional contexts. Second, the Labs feed privileges works‑in‑progress: titles like “Slash‑Brand Architecture: A Formal Analysis of the /Matt Constellation” or “Multiple‑Self Signalling: An Academic Analysis of Matthew Shadbolt’s 1998 – 2025 Citation Ecology” foreground processual meta‑reflection, mirroring the memex ideal that scholarship should expose its own trail‑making. Third, the site’s habit of remixing the same motif across genres—the Anglo‑Zulu climate shock that begins life as a history paper, resurfaces as a speculative war‑gaming scenario, and later powers a multimedia “Laboratory Two” essay—models the rhizomatic reuse that Bush believed would convert “information explosion” into “knowledge explosion.”
Seen from the vantage of contemporary media anthropology, Anthology/Matt also exemplifies what Anja Dreschke and colleagues call multimodal digital curating: the practice of “selection, organisation, ordering, contextualisation and public presentation” that treats the website itself as both archive and argument. Their framework emphasises curation as experiment—an ethos visible in Shadbolt’s willingness to let algorithmic image‑generation sit cheek‑by‑jowl with peer‑review‑adjacent research. The Semi‑Truths & Stories catalogue (“Those in Coach Were the First to Go,” “I Can’t Take Geek Culture Anymore”) performs a similar multimodal juggling act: autofiction, product‑manager memoir, and sociological micro‑ethnography share the same template, underscoring the editor’s belief that method lies less in genre than in framing.
That curatorial stance has material stakes. Catherine Marshall’s classic study of personal digital archiving showed that many self‑publishers default to “benign neglect,” trusting platforms to preserve material that often vanishes without warning. By scattering his archive across redundant domains and maintaining his own Squarespace backend, Shadbolt implicitly enacts the more resilient strategy Marshall recommended: multiple servers, deliberate versioning, and—in Bush’s terms—user‑controlled indexing. The slash‑brand constellation thus doubles as a preservation tactic, ensuring that no single outage can erase the broader intellectual ecology.
Yet the site’s most esoteric virtue may be its rehabilitation of liminality—a concept that recurs in titles like “Liminal, Loathing & Leveling‑Up” and “The Gates of Horn & Ivory.” In classical anthropology, liminality names the threshold state in rites of passage; in digital culture, it often describes the eerie ambience of empty office parks or 404 pages. Shadbolt synthesises both senses: his “Laboratory Two” speculations on Joy Division treat the band’s sparse filmography as a liminal soundscape, while his EastEnders multiverse pitch reframes a soap opera’s episodic resets as ritualised liminal cycles. By nesting these analyses within a site architected as a perpetual threshold—one can always exit a category into another, always stumble from fact to fiction—Shadbolt turns user navigation itself into a rite of passage, staging the browser as initiate.
The payoff of this design is pedagogical. Because the miscellany prizes juxtaposition, each click trains the reader to practise comparative method: Brexit meets Vedic cosmology, Destiny’s SIVA plague meets programmable matter start‑ups, Pericles meets product‑road‑map theory. The result is what the nineteenth‑century miscellany editor Thomas Percy called “unexpected correspondences,” but now turbocharged by embedded hyperlinks and RSS feeds. In Bush’s idiom, Anthology/Matt functions as a personal memex that Shadbolt has opened to public read‑write access, offering visitors not a static résumé but a sandbox in which scholarly inference and pop‑cultural riffing energise one another.
All this suggests that the real achievement of Anthology/Matt is not the impressive range of its individual essays—though the scholarship on Zoroastrian Towers of Silence or the statistical modelling of American paranormal pursuit would stand comfortably in an academic journal—but the meta‑argument the site enacts about knowledge itself. By resurrecting the miscellany’s celebratory heterogeneity and fusing it with the memex’s associative infrastructure, Shadbolt demonstrates a counter‑intuition rarely acknowledged in an era obsessed with niche personal branding: that intellectual authority can be amplified, rather than diluted, by embracing formal promiscuity. In this sense Anthology/Matt is not simply a clever portfolio; it is a working proof that a twenty‑first‑century thinker can curate with the breadth of an eighteenth‑century miscellanist while maintaining the rigorous metadata hygiene demanded by contemporary digital preservationists.
For a reader attuned to these deeper mechanics, each visit to the site becomes an invitation to practise curating as research: to trace your own trail through fragments, annotate them with new associations, and perhaps fold that emergent strand back into the archive via the Contact form or a guest submission. In doing so you participate in the very “daily operation” that structures the Labs—an ongoing negotiation between order and serendipity, between the canonising impulse of the anthology and the eclectic vitality of the miscellany. Shadbolt’s website, then, is less a finished anthology than a call to continuous, collaborative miscellany‑making—an exhortation to build the memex we were promised, one hyperlink at a time.
