The Lost Curator

Personal Digital Archives and the Death Transition
Evan Carroll
The Digital Beyond

About Me
Author of Your Digital Afterlife
Author and editor at TheDigitalBeyond.com
UX Designer by trade

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)

Shift to Digital

Issues
Awareness
Access
Ownership
Preservation
And countless others

Meaning
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?

Value
Value is relative, changing from person to person and time to time.
Value is extracted from more than just the content. Sometimes you need the story behind the object to appreciate it.

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 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?

Thanks
Evan Carroll
evan@thedigitalbeyond.com
@evancarroll

The Lost Curator

by Evan Carroll on Feb 25, 2011

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The Lost Curator — Presentation Transcript