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A Digital Life
Abstract
New systems may allow people to record everything they see and hear—and even things they cannot sense—and to store all these data in a personal digital archive
... The field of personal archiving rose when individuals began creating primarily digital-born information (Brügger Niels and Milligan 2019;Hawkins 2013). This exponential growth in daily-and mostly digital-information production and the associated long-term preservation difficulties (Bell and Gemmell 2007;Hawkins 2013;Marshall 2007) drew attention from archival practitioners and scholars. Perhaps because of this historical shift in information technologies, the field of personal archiving has diversified its attention, shifting from a paper-only focus to concern on various types of materials, both physical and digital (Hobbs 2010). ...
... The sub-field of Personal Digital Archiving (PDA) is centered on the activities people engage in to manage or keep track of their personal digital records and how these are stored, organized, kept, and described (Bell and Gemmell 2007;Hobbs 2001;Marshall 2007;Redwine 2015). PDA's primary concerns are the looming risk of a "societal Alzheimer's" posed by the challenges of preserving personal digital collections, including born-digital material stored off and online (Cox 2008) and the difficulties of selecting, storing, (John et al. 2010; Society of American Archivists 2013) describing, and organizing the ever-growing amounts of digital information (van Bussel and Hanseler 2013). ...
... Prior work on non-military personal records has also studied how different contexts impact personal recordkeeping (Bell and Gemmell 2007;Hawkins 2013;John et al. 2010;Marshall 2007; Society of American Archivists 2013; van Bussel and Hanseler 2013). Specifically, prior research has described how the advent of new communication technologies facilitates fast-paced production of newborn digital information which often leads to scattered records across platforms and devices, high costs of maintaining digital records in the long term, and information policies shaping the scope and number of records being produced and retained (Bell and Gemmell 2007;Hawkins 2013;Marshall et al. 2007). ...
While service and operational records of the US armed forces have been previously investigated, personal communication records of military personnel have received less attention in archival scholarship. Specifically, we are concerned with the ways that changes in technology challenge the preservation of personal communications records. This issue is important because personal communication records of service members, both active and retired, can support military personnel and their families in managing the stress of deployment. Moreover, such records can help military families cope with grief when a service member dies. In this study, we address this gap by exploring the communication practices of US military personnel who served between 2005 and 2020. We focus on how military personnel communicated with their friends and family, the records that resulted from such communications, and the impacts of information technologies and institutional policies of the armed forces in said recordkeeping practices. We found that these practices evolved in tandem with the information and communication technologies available to them, that military personnel employed a relational approach to records and recordkeeping, and that recordkeeping practices of personal communications were directly connected to factors such as the information policies of the armed forces and the blurred lines between the on and off duty lives of active service members. Based on our findings, we suggest that future work should develop guidelines that help service members and their families prioritize which personal communications to record and keep.
... Individuals have indeed started to perceive digital objects as virtual possessions (Odom et al. 2010). Over the last 20-30 years, with the rapid diffusion of affordable computers and personal digital storage spaces, together with an ever-growing number of devices per person, and the increasingly ubiquitous access to the Internet (Brügger and Milligan 2018;Hawkins 2013), the daily amount of data produced by individuals has drastically augmented, adding new challenges to the long-term preservation of this digital material (Bell and Gemmell 2007;Hawkins 2013;Marshall 2007). ...
... A considerable amount of studies have emerged on the matter of "Personal Digital Archiving", a term used to describe all those activities that individuals perform in order to "manage or keep track of their digital files, where they store them, and how these files are described and organised" (Bell and Gemmell 2007;Hobbs 2001;Marshall 2007;Redwine 2015). Almost a decade ago, Richard Cox warned about the impact that new technologies and media might have on the preservation of personal digital collections-now including a combination of born-digital material stored both offline and online-and the imminent risk of incurring in a type of "societal Alzheimer's" (Cox 2009). ...
After more than a decade of usage, social media have become a virtual environment where meaningful content is created and kept, highlighting its potential to become part of personal digital archives. This study investigates users’ attitudes and preservation practices related to digital memories created on social media. Survey findings highlighted how users seem to consider these items as meaningful digital traces to document important events of their lives, and a potential inherent part of their personal archives. However, results show how this attitude does not seem to be supported by adequate preservation strategies. After analysing social media platforms’ policies in relation to users’ preservation practices, we advocate for raising more awareness among both users and service providers regarding the risks posed by the ephemerality of the digital world and the need for specific provisions that go beyond the short-term retention of data and look to the future and potential use of what appears to be considered an inherent part of individuals’ personal archives.
Personal digital archiving (PDA) is a type of personal information behaviour related to personal memory and identity construction. The aim of this study is to discover and define individual’s perceived values in relation to personal digital archives, and to explore their relationship between PDA behaviours. Based on the grounded theory, drawing on in-depth interviews with 14 Chinese college students, both the perceived values in relation to personal digital archives and the PDA behaviours were coded through open, axial, and selective coding processes. This study found the perceived values in relation to personal digital archives mainly include subject value, object value, intermediary value, value to other subjects and social value, PDA behaviours mainly include accumulation behaviour, use behaviour, appraisal behaviour and disposal behaviour. Moreover, the value cognition of personal digital archives is the intermediary link between perceived values and PDA behaviours and is the core connecting the two. Value cognition can be divided into judgement on whether personal digital archives are valuable, subdivision of value types of personal digital archives, value evaluation of personal digital archives, and cognition of enhancing or weakening the value of personal digital archives. The study comprehensively analysed the perceived values, value cognition that drive PDA behaviours, built the relationship between perceived values, value cognition and PDA behaviours, and answered the question of why individuals want to archive from cognitive and behavioural perspectives. The findings of the study can help librarians to conduct more targetted PDA education and improve the public’s awareness and literacy in PDA.
The fostering of active communication on social networking services to revitalize the local community requires the proliferation of mobile communication terminals (MCTs) and the improvement of the communication environment. In this chapter, we outline the configuration and usage of mobile communication networks that are necessary for obtaining and sharing information in real space. We begin by revisiting the history of mobile communication terminals and mobile networks, primarily focusing on the history of Japan. Next, we introduce cloud networks and mobile sensing, which are feasible mainly because of the development of MCTs and mobile networks. Subsequently, we introduce certain recent applications enabled by MCTs and mobile networks that revitalize the local community.KeywordsMobile communication terminalMobile sensingLifelogRecommendationReal spaceIndoor positioning
Background:
Over the past decade, the wide availability and small size of different types of sensors, together with the decrease in pricing, have allowed the acquisition of a substantial amount of data about a person's life in real time. These sensors can be incorporated into personal electronic devices available at a reasonable cost, such as smartphones and small wearable devices. They allow the acquisition of images, audio, location, physical activity, and physiological signals among other data. With these data, usually denoted as lifelog data, we can then analyze and understand personal experiences and behaviors. This process is called lifelogging.
Objective:
The objective of this paper was to present a narrative review of the existing literature about lifelogging over the past decade. To achieve this goal, we analyzed lifelogging applications used to retrieve relevant information from daily digital data, some of them with the purpose of monitoring and assisting people with memory issues and others designed for memory augmentation. We aimed for this review to be used by researchers to obtain a broad idea of the type of data used, methodologies, and applications available in this research field.
Methods:
We followed a narrative review methodology to conduct a comprehensive search for relevant publications in Google Scholar and Scopus databases using lifelog topic-related keywords. A total of 411 publications were retrieved and screened. Of these 411 publications, 114 (27.7%) publications were fully reviewed. In addition, 30 publications were manually included based on our bibliographical knowledge of this research field.
Results:
From the 144 reviewed publications, a total of 113 (78.5%) were selected and included in this narrative review based on content analysis. The findings of this narrative review suggest that lifelogs are prone to become powerful tools to retrieve memories or increase knowledge about an individual's experiences or behaviors. Several computational tools are already available for a considerable range of applications. These tools use multimodal data of different natures, with visual lifelogs being one of the most used and rich sources of information. Different approaches and algorithms to process these data are currently in use, as this review will unravel. Moreover, we identified several open questions and possible lines of investigation in lifelogging.
Conclusions:
The use of personal lifelogs can be beneficial to improve the quality of our life, as they can serve as tools for memory augmentation or for providing support to people with memory issues. Through the acquisition and analysis of lifelog data, lifelogging systems can create digital memories that can be potentially used as surrogate memory. Through this narrative review, we understand that contextual information can be extracted from lifelogs, which provides an understanding of the daily life of a person based on events, experiences, and behaviors.
The technological advancements have turned smartphones into powerful lifelogging devices. Smartphone-based lifelogging system captures and stores information about peoples’ daily life activities, behaviors, interactions, and contexts into rich personal big data archives. The personal big data is of potential interest to the information sciences researchers and policy and decision makers in governments and organizations because of the availability of information, which would be impossible otherwise. Despite its potential, the smartphone-based lifelogging has been limitedly been explored from the big data perspective. This paper aims to provide a close-up view of the smartphone-based lifelogging as the source of personal big data. First, the smartphone-based lifelogging is reviewed to demonstrate its technological capabilities for personal big data generation and conformance to big data characteristics, alongside key personal big data applications. Second, a generalized architecture is presented for smartphone-based lifelog personal big data systems using big data systems design principals to advance the research in this space. Third, several challenges are highlighted regarding data capture, storage, analysis, visualization, privacy, and security. To address these concerns, several recommendations are suggested to improve personal big data generation, management, and usability.
Der Beitrag rekonstruiert die Vorgeschichte der gegenwärtigen Selbsttrackingund Selbstoptimierungsverfahren. Dazu erweist es sich als sinnvoll, auf eine Sachlage zurückzugreifen, die das Phänomen der Datenverarbeitung als Problem seiner Materialität und seines Umfangs virulent werden lässt. Für den deutschen Sprachraum spitzt sich diese Konstellation am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts zu – in einem Moment, in dem das Projekt einer Datenverarbeitung sich über etwas scheinbar Selbstverständliches zu verständigen beginnt: die Frage nämlich, was denn überhaupt ein Datum ist. Daran schließt sich die Folgefrage an, welche Rolle medienhistorisch variante Formen einer Datenpolitik für die Genealogie von Selbstverhältnissen haben.
The technology and tools that we develop have always been transformative, but the pace of change, particularly in the last few decades is undoubtedly altering humans in ways we don’t understand. As researchers look to develop novel prosthetics and tools to enhance our memories and extend cognition, further consideration is needed to understand how technologies can help (or, indeed, hinder) our inherent abilities. In this chapter, we identify two distinct forms of cognitive risk associated with current and emerging technologies: memory inhibition and memory distortion. We describe how lifelogging, search engines, social media, satnavs and other developments are prompting us to retain less information for ourselves (inhibition), and present three specific examples of this phenomenon: the Google effect, photo-taking-impairment and alterations in spatial memory attributed to satnav use. We further consider cases in which technology actually increases the likelihood of errors in what and how we remember (distortion), including doctored evidence effects, creation of false memories for current or historical affairs (“fake news”) and retrieval-induced forgetting. Finally, we provide an exploration of these cognitive vulnerabilities in the context of human memory augmentation, including the reporting of a mixed design experiment with 48 participants in which we demonstrate both retrieval-induced forgetting and false memory creation for real-world experiences.
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