Digital_Heirloom

Our communication methods have improved over time, from stone tablets, papyrus, and vellum through to the printing press and the World Wide Web. But while the web has democratised publishing, allowing anyone to share ideas with a global audience, it doesn’t appear to be the best medium for preserving our cultural resources: websites and documents disappear down the digital memory hole every day. This presentation will look at the scale of the problem and propose methods for tackling our collective data loss.

Jeremy Keith

Last week, the Library of Congress decided to store the complete archives of Twitter. Starting six months from now, every last tweet—currently produced at a rate of 50 million a day—will be saved on an LoC hard drive and will presumably be accessible to historians for … well, forever.

The question is, does the preservation of digital content, from tweets to Facebook updates to blog comments, make the job of historians easier or harder?

How Future Historians will use the Twitter Archives

Emory University in Atlanta is currently exhibiting Salman Rushdie’s personal archive, including personal papers, and electronically produced drafts of his novels.

The 18 gigabytes of data they contain seemed to promise future biographers and literary scholars a digital wonderland: comprehensive, organized and searchable files, quickly accessible with a few clicks.

Though computers have been commonly used for more than two decades, archives from writers who used them are just beginning to make their way into collections. 

Leslie Morris, a curator at the Houghton Library, said, “We don’t really have any methodology as of yet” to process born-digital material. “We just store the disks in our climate-controlled stacks, and we’re hoping for some kind of universal Harvard guidelines,” she added.

At the Emory exhibition, visitors can log onto a computer and see the screen that Mr. Rushdie saw, search his file folders as he did, and find out what applications he used. (Mac Stickies were a favorite.) They can call up an early draft of Mr. Rushdie’s 1999 novel, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” and edit a sentence or post an editorial comment.

To the Emory team, simulating the author’s electronic universe is equivalent to making a reproduction of the desk, chair, fountain pen and paper that, say, Charles Dickens used, and then allowing visitors to sit and scribble notes on a copy of an early version of “Bleak House.”

“If you’re interested in primary materials, you’re interested in the context as well as the content, the authentic artifact,” Ms. Farr said. “Fifty years from now, people may be researching how the impact of word processing affected literary output,” she added, which would require seeing the original computer images.

It may even be possible in the future to examine literary influences by matching which Web sites a writer visited on a particular day with the manuscript he or she was working on at the time.

Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit

This video explains the issues of death and the opportunities brought about by technology and the Internet.

This video explains some of the hurdles between you and the digital afterlife.

The Digital Beyond

Long Now Digital Research Director Kurt Bollacker was recently published in New Scientist discussing the challenges in maintaining data for the long haul:

Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, an increasing proportion of the information we create and use has been in the form of digital data. Many (most?) of us have given up writing messages on paper, instead adopting electronic formats, and have exchanged film-based photographic cameras for digital ones. Will those precious family photographs and letters—that is, email messages—created today survive for future generations, or will they suffer a sad fate like my backup floppy disks? It seems unavoidable that most of the data in our future will be digital, so it behooves us to understand how to manage and preserve digital data so we can avoid what some have called the “digital dark age.” This is the idea—or fear!—that if we cannot learn to explicitly save our digital data, we will lose that data and, with it, the record that future generations might use to remember and understand us.

Individuals must become more aware of the digital footprints they leave behind. This fictional story of Andy demonstrates the importance of understanding one’s digital identity.

Here is the presentation Richard Banks did at the PSFK Conference in London last year.

He spoke about what he refers to as “digital heirlooms” and discussed the histories we are creating about ourselves through digital media and how future generations will interact with the artifacts we leave behind.

Richard considered the current products of our technology, such as the thousands of digital photos taken by people each year, and discussed their endurance over time. While previous generations left tangible objects, our current generation has digital ones– and multitudes more. Our digital objects (physical or virtual) are rarely thought of in the long term. Instead, they are instantly consumed and then disposed of.

Richard also discusses the ‘breadcrumbs’ that we are leaving behind and how future generations will find them. He questions the existing customs and rituals involved with inheritances and how these mores could be applied to our technological heirlooms.

Richard Banks works for microsoft and does some really amazing work around the concept of digital heirlooms - he is also the inspiration for this blog’s name.    In any case, he has posted a great overview of his research on his site (re-blogged in entirety here).

Technology + Time

This idea of thinking about technology over extended lengths of time is a primary motivator for us. It seems quite striking how our relationship with technological objects and digital “things” has become quite fleeting. I no longer expect to buy a phone or an mp3 player and keep it more than a few years. I’ve become used to the idea that something better is just around the corner and I’m quite prepared to abandon what I have now to get it. This seems a little odd.

There’s a Green imperative here, of course, as there seems to be in pretty much everything we do now. It seems unsustainable to continue throwing these physical items into landfills, and we either need to change that habit, or find a way of making the cycle less onerous. In Cambridge we’re interested in this ethical dimension, of course, but more broadly we really seek to understand what it means to have an attachment with our things that extends beyond such short periods of time. There are items that we keep and treasure in our homes already, but these tend not to be technological, beyond the odd collection of ancient video games that a few individuals don’t seem to be able to part with. Why do we keep some things, and not others?

The Role of Objects in Our Lives

We’re trying to think about this more broadly because our relationship to the things we keep matters not only for physical items, but, we assume, also for the megabytes of data that we’re creating. It is common, for example, to keep and display printed photos in our home. They act as touchstones for us to people and events in our past. They tell visitors to our homes something about us through the choices we make of their content, where they are placed and the prominence they are given. And because these items are physical, their condition tells us something too. They acquire a patina of their own that tell us stories of use. Fingerprints on glass show that attention was paid to them. Nicks and scratches on the frame show how well they were taken care of.

So these items help us remember; tell others something about us through our environment; and tell their own story of use as objects. Is this true of the new digital things in our lives? Is this true, for example, for the thousands of digital photos that many of us are now taking every year? To some extent it may be too early to tell. Our relationship to digital content is still a relatively new one. So part of the work we’re doing in Cambridge is to extrapolate out to try and anticipate how our relationship with digital things will change once we ever get used to having them around over the long term.

As a designer, this is a tough space to design for. It’s impossible to predict what items a person will keep and put on display in their home. How can we know what’s likely to be precious to them? An object that seems worthless to one person may be charged with sentiment for another.

The Role of Objects Beyond our Lives

This question of the role of sentiment extends past our own lifetimes, just as the objects themselves are likely to outlive us. What happens to them at the end of our lives? Just as our physical things live on past us, sometimes becoming a part of the lives of our offspring, other family or friends, this will surely be true of our digital items.

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Here’s Bruce Sterling’s speech at Transmediale, a talk on “atemporality for the creative artist,” which explains what the net and technology have done to the idea of the history and the future.  This shit is deep…