The Personal Analytics of My Life by Stephen Wolfram

The Personal Analytics of My Life
March 8, 2012

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/

Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Wolfram|Alpha, and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research.
This is his blog post about his own (quantitative) exploration of his e-mail collection with Mathematica.
(Blog post provides more personal feeling when talking about a personal life in my opinion.)

Related New York Times Article:
What 23 Years of E-Mail May Say About You
By ANNE EISENBERG, Published: April 7, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/business/mining-our-personal-data-for-our-own-good.html?_r=0

The Day of Digital Archives is making a return: October 12, 2012

Kindly pointed to me by Catherine Hobbs, the Literary Archivist (English-language) at Library and Archives Canada.

Interesting project blog where you can hear stories from archivists and preservation professionals who want to "help raise awareness of digital archives among both users and managers."

http://dayofdigitalarchives.blogspot.com/

Notes from Personal Archiving 2012, Internet Archives

Personal Archiving website: http://www.personalarchiving.com/

Some of the interesting Websites mentioned

By Stan James http://scanwithstan.com/
By Jonathan Harris http://cowbird.com/
By Kaliya Hamlin http://www.identitywoman.net/
Commercial site: Pinterest http://pinterest.com/

"Are we digital hoarders?"
The conference has been amazingly fun and great. The only thing that I make me think negatively is that people using the term "digital hoarder" somewhat casually, for example "I am a digital hoarder." Although I am aware that people have different definitions of words that they are using, hoarding or hoarder carries a psychological sense or at least a sense of excessive behavior that causes some sort of abnormality in everyday lives. Simply because people tend to collect more, a lot more, digital information, it does not seem appropriate to "tag" it as a hoarding behavior. Also, I do not feel right about using the term casually since there are people who need professional help due to this type of abnormal behavior.

"Pro-active approach"
Another thing makes me want to raise my hands is a repetitive emphasis on "pro-active approach." As a person with archives and preservation background, I fully understand the benefits and necessity of proactive approach. I am all for it. However, I also want to be a bit critical and rethink about it. Meanings, values, memories, and especially narratives that many people in here advocate to capture, are changing constantly closely related to the course of life, depending on the very context of life. Proactive approach might miss this delicate, complex, and dynamic nature of the life-long relationship between people and their digital documents.

Personal digital archives: Preservation of documents, preservation of self

Dissertation proposal [PDF]: Personal digital archives: Preservation of documents, preservation of self. Sarah Kim, defended and passed on December, 2010.

Abstract:
Personal archiving is a practice through which people manage and preserve documents that have
particular meanings to them for a long time. The pervasive use of digital technology in everyday
life changes the way that people interact with documents and thus have an influence on archiving
practices. Viewing personal archiving as a self-reflective practice that involves psychological
and social processes of reviewing, understanding, and presenting life and self, the proposed study aims to explore digital archiving of ordinary individuals in relation to the construction of self. It uses in-depth case studies to gain a holistic understanding of how people conduct and experience archiving in a digital environment as close to research participants‟ perspectives as possible. Findings of the proposed study will eventually contribute to development of a theory or a model of personal digital archiving, which can have implications for research on digital cultural heritage preservation and personal information management/archiving tools and services design.

Research method for personal digital archiving research

I have been exploring Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) as a research method for my dissertation. IPA's idiographic and inductive approach seems like a perfect match for studying personal digital archiving practices in everyday lives.

Interesting short articles about IPA:
Smith, J. A. (2004). Reflecting on the development of interpretative phenomenological analysis and its contribution to qualitative research in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 1(1), 39-54.

Larkin, M., Watts, S., & Clifton, E. (2006). Giving voice and making sense in interpretative phenomenological analysis. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 102-120.

Society of American Archivists Poster

Thank you everyone who gave me encouraging comments on the Personal Digital Archives poster presented at the Society of American Archivists annual meeting in San Francisco, August 2008.

JPEG Image of the poster is available on the Web: http://srhkim.com/files/SAA_poster_PersonalDigitalArchives-Kim-2008-web.pdf

Content of the poster:

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Society of American Archivist: ARCHIVES 2008

Personal Digital Archives
Sarah Kim, School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin, August 28-30, 2008

What is happening
Living with personal digital materials
Everyday accumulation: Individuals are constantly surrounded by evolving digital information technology. Consequently, accumulate a large amount of personal digital materials overtime in their everyday lives (e.g., digital photographs, document files, websites, blogs, e-mails, audio-video materials, etc.).

Everyday management: Individuals develop and practice their own methods to manage their personal digital materials using various on/off-line virtual spaces, whether it is “benign neglect,” panicky backup, building a labyrinth of directories, or creating multiple duplicate files and storing them in different locations.

Increasing archival preservation needs for personal digital materials
Personal digital materials are and may be the only evidence of the active interactions between individuals and society; they are the fragments of memory documenting the lives of individuals, families, and society. Personal digital materials should be treated as archives and preserved beyond one’s lifetime so future generations of families, communities, and societies can (re)construct their identities, traditions, and histories.

Challenges of long-term survival of personal digital materials

• Less likelihood to survive: There is great risk for personal digital materials to become obsolescent due to rapid technological changes.
• Immeasurable quantity: Due to the ubiquitous use of digital technology in everyday life, the amount of personal digital materials is staggering
• Inherently personal: The value of personal digital materials shifts over time through individuals’ lives. Selecting what to keep, what to destroy, and who will have access to them is a matter of personal decision.
• Heterogeneity: It is difficult to generalize the types of personal digital materials and the everyday record creating/keeping practices of individuals.

What is needed
Grass-root level preservation of personal digital materials
Private individual and/or family digital archives

• Functions as a space for self-representation and/or self-reflection; a place where future generations can learn about the individual, what she did and how thought of herself.
• Functions as a centralized personal digital repository.
• Aims for long-term preservation as an archives, rather than as mere data storage.
• Managed and operated by individuals as a part of their everyday record-keeping practices;
• Will be maintained through future generations by families or by archival institutions.

Personal Digital Archives and the Archival Profession
The preservation of cultural memories captured in personal documents (paper and recently, digital form) is one of the primary duties of the archival profession for hundreds of years. Preservation practices, theories, and experiences nurtured in the archival profession will provide the intellectual foundation for personal digital archives.

• In the post-custodial era, the archivist should take on the role as facilitator of personal digital archives or as the developer of personal digital archives system.
• While individual personal digital archives function as private archives, they can be integrated into the larger effort to preserve society’s cultural heritage under the concept of documentation strategies.
• Issues of appraisal, privacy, intellectual property rights, access, which are all largely discussed in the archival tradition, will provide valuable insights into similar issues of personal digital archives.
• Digital preservation strategies and methods that have been seriously explored in the field of archives for decades, such as the development of the Open Archives Information System Reference Model and practices of institutional repositories, can be applied to develop a system model, software, and/or services for personal digital archives.

Current Movements: Numerous entities are conducting research on how individuals are managing (keeping, organizing, and retrieving) their personal digital materials. [e.g., Digital Lives Research Project, Researchers in Personal Information Management (PIM) studies, Microsoft MyLifeBits project, etc.]

Why do you need personal digital archives?: Ubiquitous archiving

Digital information technology does not change merely the form of records; it changes the ways that people communicate and express themselves as well. Individuals have more opportunities to actively speak for themselves through ubiquitous digital information technology. Digital technology also lets them work in a more complex networked environment than ever before, and over time they accumulate a large amount of personal digital material. These personal digital materials comprise the evidence of the active interaction between individuals and society. As fragments of memory documenting the lives of individuals, families and society, these materials have immense historical research value and need to be preserved for future generations.

Defining personal digital archives

While I took the Appraisal and Selection of Records class instructed by Dr. Patricia Galloway I had an opportunity to consider further about how I can define personal digital archives in my research.
Personal digital archives mean private archives of ordinary individuals that:
1. Contain personal digital materials created, collected and accumulated by individuals that carry one’s life experiences and memories;
2. Are originated and developed by individuals in their daily lives;
3. Are more than collections but archives that have a potential for long term existence after the individual dies, preserved not necessarily at the institutional level but at the grass-roots level.

Personal digital archives as a research theme

Personal digital archives is my doctoral research topic. This idea began with simple curiosity about the methods used by individuals to preserve digital materials in their everyday lives, such as digital photographs, document files, websites, blogs, and audio-video materials.
In my study, the meaning of personal digital archives is not limited to preserving personal records at the institutional level, but includes individual archives managed and operated by people in their private lives.
I want to explore how ordinary people can build and maintain their personal and/or family archives in the digital information environment. Personal digital archives are not only about storing digital objects, but are also about preserving individuals' life time experiences, memories, and relationship with others and societies that carry priceless historical values.
This issue will also include topics such as personal records-keeping and/or preservation behavior and social meanings of archiving activities. I prefer genre oriented, domain-specific, and micro approaches built on real experiences.
"Personal digital archives" which will and/or should be everywhere in the near future.