Preserving Personal Legacy in the Digital Age

Preserving Personal Legacy in the Digital Age
Evan Carroll
The Digital Beyond

About Me
Author of Your Digital Afterlife
Author and editor at TheDigitalBeyond.com
User Experience Designer by trade
BS and MS (2012) in Information Science at UNC-Chapel Hill

Legacy

Legacy
Noun
an amount of money or property left to someone in a will.
a thing handed down by a predecessor : the legacy of centuries of neglect.
Adjective
Computing: denoting software or hardware that has been superseded but is difficult to replace because of its wide use.

What is Personal Legacy?

Courtesy of John Romano

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thaddeusstewart/4347534278/

Personal Identity

Erving Goffman1959

Identity Preservation
Objects are passed to heirs as an act of identity preservation.
Objects are often imbued with meaning.
The story
Why it’s important
Unruh (1983) Price, Arnould, & Curasi (2000)

Personal Collections

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_t_in_dc/2662243843

Shift to Digital

Justin Ellsworth2004

Leslie Harpold2006

Issues
Awareness
Access
Ownership
Preservation
And countless others

Digital Estate Planning
A repository of accounts and credentials that’s inaccessible by heirs until the account owner passes away.
Verified by death certificate, secure codes or by trusted notifiers.
Solves the issues of access and ownership.

Digital Estate Planning
Legacy Locker
Entrustet
DataInherit
www.thedigitalbeyond.com/online-services-list/

Site Policy
Grant access to heirs
Provide content (but not access) to heirs
Delete accounts
Memorialize accounts

Statutes
Email: ConnecticutRhode Island
Email and Online Accounts: OklahomaIdaho

Going Forward

Awareness Is Low
Only 30% of Americans have a will
Digital estate planning companies report low signups
It’s like backing up, few actually do it
Benign neglect

As Archivists…
How can we imbue digital objects with meaning?
How can we design personal archives so that a lifetime of digital content can be accessible and meaningful to future generations?

How Do We…
Ease the transition from the creator to new curators?
Honor and respect the wishes of the deceased?
Maintain the personal value of the collection?

Design + Education

Design Principles
Ensure awareness and access
Wishes of the deceased
Communicate personal value
Tackle quantity
Provide communal experience.

Awareness and Access
It’s not always easy to find digital objects.
Heirs are necessarily sophisticated technology users.
PDA systems should provide a means of awareness and access.

Wishes
How can we record and enforce the wishes of the deceased?
Family members and other “trusted” caretakers often have other ideas.

Communicate Value
Why did the creator believe this object was important?
We already have some metadata, but how can we passively capture meaning?

Tackle Quantity
Will caretakers of personal archives be overwhelmed by quantity?
One important object is often as valuable 10,000 objects.

Communal Experience
Digital objects move us away from experiencing them together in person.
Can we attach comments and other conversations to our digital objects?

Education
Organization
File formats
Storage media
Curation
Metadata

Parting Thoughts

JéromeBon. Used By Permission.

Thanks
Evan Carroll
evan@thedigitalbeyond.com
@evancarroll

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Preserving Personal Legacy in the Digital Age

by Evan Carroll on Jun 26, 2011

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Preserving Personal Legacy in the Digital Age — Presentation Transcript