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Content Creation Tools of Digital Memory Traces

Content Creation Tools of Digital Memory Traces - Two main technologies are available to create content: text and images. The former allows for complexity in terms of interactivity, logic, and also storage size within the e-learning software developed during these two years. This complexity translates into large development time, requiring a team of instructional designers and developers for content results. The second means, i.e., images, is what most online resources use, and it enables a significant level of productivity—an important feature in an environment where time for content creation is often scarce. Digital Memory Traces offer you the opportunity to have a brand new educational resource at your disposal, or an archive that meets your teaching needs, by focusing on the production of content and offering you the platform that makes for better access and exchange of good practices and ideas that could be applicable in distinct regions. The training provided in this manual will equip you with the necessary skills to produce and share digital content.

Visual Elements

Images of various media are utilized in the website's header and are an integral part of the website. To help show the potential of community-contributed tags and transcriptions, a series of images depict newspaper articles containing instances of over-the-top reactions. These images are intended to be both amusing and related to news articles while also depicting mundane activities. We have also utilized an information map that visually depicts articles on a given article page as nodes. Node shape is also part of the mapping. Whether the article appears on the front or inside pages affects the size of the nodes, and the associated mapping is displayed below the map. Additionally, a set of visual elements is located in the article pages. To separate the article prose and photographs with the resources necessary to illustrate a given article, the photographs are placed on their own lines. This mimics the structure of a printed newspaper while also creating a link for users interested in seeing original images at higher resolutions.

Audio Integration

Our second area of integration is audio integration. As mentioned earlier, the system records both audio and paper input during a session, i.e., it records conversations, lectures, and various sounds in addition to the traces of the manipulations. For lectures and conversations, hearing the words is often critical; thus, we designed the interface to allow viewing a session while hearing the recorded audio. There are three tiers of audio integration support: 1) For any session, we do our best to capture and display associated audio, which can be linearly accessed; 2) For session viewing, as the audio is displayed, the interface enables one-click access to associated handwriting with the corresponding word highlighted; 3) Time-synced to replay while interacting with reconstructed content. For instance, given a trace of the original source and a file that gives the time each visual edit occurred, we created an editable website that generates a movie that exhibits how the source is modified, synchronized with any audio associated with the session.

Since all the paper input strokes are recorded, the system can continuously recreate original drawings with added edge enhancements. But these pen strokes can also be played as audio, much like an ink player or music box. In conjunction with the audio, the session can be visualized and associated written and oral words captured in real time. The ability to record and review the paper strokes as they were drawn, and with any related audio, is thus possible.

Textual Contributions

Digital Memory Traces: A Platform for Creation and Sharing "Hunting Memories" is a collaborative initiative where field botanists and computer scientists work together to design and utilize a platform for the creation and sharing of digital memory traces in the form of multimedia field guides that support collective memory. Field guides of plants, animals, and fungi are an essential tool for cooperative learning, field identification, documentation, and the sharing of experts’ and amateurs’ knowledge. All this can be supported by employing a specifically tailored platform for creating and sharing collection objects in the form of interactive dynamic multimedia field guides, using collaborative semantics, mechanisms, and freely available software tools. The resultant platform is designed for use during joint field excursions and open-ended community browsing. It employs extensions of traditional field guides in book and digital form, containing ready-to-use multimedia templates, added-value applications, and is integrated with publishing mechanisms with a special imprint policy designed to share ideas beyond the realm of the field excursion.

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Platform Design and Development of Digital Memory Traces

Platform Design and Development of Digital Memory Traces - Applying our use case driven approach, we designed and built the Digital Memory Traces platform. It offers functionalities to support the definition and development of service ideas by addressing media collection and use as well as social interactions. The definition of different media types and functionalities to participate and engage is key to targeting a wide user community. The media types used during intake and developed throughout the project emanate from our model. Applying this model, we identified the following formats: Story, Memory Fragment, Reflection, Statement, and Photo. To capture the experiences of sharing memories, we introduced an additional format: Experience. Our platform applies storytelling and encourages a close look and social interaction, which is solely created in a co-creation manner.

The discussion in the preceding pages has confirmed the need for web-based applications that facilitate participation, creation, sharing, and co-creation of personal content-based information services. We refer to these web-based applications as media-sharing platforms. The literature focused on the micro level – the individual creating, capturing, storing, and sharing personal content intelligence. Business services need stories, with people in them, to engage, interact, and motivate clients. Therefore, at a macro level, we need to rethink how to facilitate mass creation, sharing, and embedding of stories, photo collections, reflections, goals, and 'memories'.

User Interface Design

The focus is on students and teachers-developers, thus promoting change in teaching and learning, contributing to improving the learning process. The user can access DMT, using the functionalities that allow exploring the traces, visualizing results obtained from parameters defined in a trace, starting the configuration of a trace, and obtaining snippets using the parameter estimation process. Snippets are pieces of multimedia that the machine learning algorithm selects for human annotation in order to help it learn how to spot a specific category. They include segments of videos and are painful interactive processes of data collection where human annotation is required. At the moment, the application does not have the used data stored in an adequate way, constituting future work. User access to the application, except for adding new algorithms and/or editing estimates, is conditioned on authorization.

Based on the study of similar applications and user experience design principles, it explains how the visual design should be, underlining the importance of brevity, or the user's ability to interact with less content, making extensive use of the horizontal scroll and load more. This is very useful for educational settings, where it is difficult for a person to interact with a great amount of simultaneous information. It suggests research on the design of data quality measures with an ergonomic approach and using them in the user interface, between machine learning researchers and the audience they seek to serve, in the context of machine learning for video data. Machine learning research has been primarily concerned with accuracy, or minimizing the difference between algorithm and human labeling assignments. They suggest a positive approach, assuming that they can design sampling schemes, factors that affect performance, and conditions that will improve sample annotation compliance.

Technical Architecture

The platform can be seen as two different layers. The lowest one is the storage, and the upper one joins storage and preservation. Under the preservation layer, creation and some specific retrieval actions are added. This approach finishes the basic concept framework of the proposed platform. Fine-tuning of the technical architecture incorporates a number of specific requirements for the platform. The first basic requirement is the digital preservation of creative, intellectual human activities that include the representation of these activities in a large number of different ways. There are basically two approaches to cope with this problem: the use of any additional metadata, which helps to describe every memory and its meaning in a highly accurate way, and the development of memory infrastructures that benefit from information redundancy and a high degree of tolerance even when part of this metadata is missing, noisy, or just wrong. These may be added to the platform as they become stable and compatible, provided they satisfy platform flexibility requirements.

In addition, another requirement must be added to allow for easy and highly intuitive access to the platform's contents. However, the search engines at this level are limited to exploring contents, not meaning and interpretation. For the same heavy computer costs, analyzing abstract contents is expected to be supported by professional expert systems available in a third-party environment as plugins. This will bring additional difficulties to the integration task, since some memory contents may be linked to specific professional analyses providing specific meaning. Moreover, the application of these professional expert systems is just complementary with respect to the memory contents distribution and availability. For these basic needs, an easy-to-access service layer is provided. It is aimed at replacing standard repository accesses with plug-in explorative services. These professional services access the data storage level using both stored memory contents and an extended semantic metadata tool and data infrastructure.

User Experience Considerations

Consideration of the user experience during the design of DMT was an ongoing and underlying theme. Trustworthiness develops as a more understated and latent aspect of educational technology. We understand our technology is a means that students can use for learning and that this raises the issue of how to design technology so that our users can trust it. Trustworthiness is related to our comprehension of the integrity of the information, and it is important because students rely on the technology to deliver accurate representations. A trustworthy system does not make itself known; it is something that is achieved through human-computer interaction. Trustworthiness is related to prolonged, active, and intense mental activities, motivational inertia, and satisfaction. The contributions to trustworthiness of these shortcuts are as follows: if a user has a good experience when they use an information system, then the user will be confident in the capabilities of the system. This is true whatever the design philosophy, and if certain user expectations are not met, the level to which a user trusts the system decreases.

Researchers must draw on standard methods and guidelines for keeping the users' interest; otherwise, it can lead to the loss of the users' trust in using the system or having faith in the choices the system has made for them. Factors to be taken into account involve component arrangement and format, timing of programs, upload time, protocol consistency, high quality, maintaining the aesthetics of design, minimizing cognitive overload, and minimizing human effort. Overall, taking these factors into consideration enhances the attractiveness and comprehension of trustworthiness for the user, which can then result in the user being confident when they use a decision support system, and it can also provide satisfaction to their needs. There will be trust in the system and consequently satisfaction. However, an undersupported, low-readiness system is just the opposite. The user's levels of trust, confidence, and satisfaction will drop, and both goals and the potential that technology can afford decrease. The alliances that have been built with the repositories and their responses to the study are perceived as ongoing and not just for the students.

Within this context, the trust issue is actually about the confidence students have. It is not about the repository or systems per se; ontologies, in fact, play a key role in this. Cognitive research suggests that finding confidence in information actually matches up to people trusting their own; in the end, it is our own minds that we need to trust, and it is our minds that, in part, are being enhanced by the technology as related to the intended learning outcomes. It is not just a question of aiding memory, but a question of the user having control and accountability, knowing what happened, and being allowed to verify as much as is possible to ensure that a trace of memory was achieved. Indeed, a human agent can be created to establish knowledge by interpreting and/or generating information from the user; therefore, the role of the repository enters into a cognitive partnership. Such an approach grants the student a sense of security and recognition for the real effort placed into creative memory work. Such an infusion of trust factors is a strong link to the achievement of high cognitive performance awareness. These findings, when explored during the design of eiron, not only shape the design themselves but also foster a sense of trust to a degree as issues are anticipated and dealt with.

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Digital Memory Traces is A Platform for Creation and Sharing

Digital Memory Traces is A Platform for Creation and Sharing - In today’s world, large quantities of personal information are created in digital form and stored on computers, mobile telephones, and portable music players. This personal content seems to be vaster and more diverse than traditional content, which is defined as publicly (professionally or self-published) content, such as newspapers, books, weblogs, and government information. Creating new tools to manage, share, and interact with personal digital content presents a number of challenges that have attracted researchers from many areas, such as imaging and retrieval, human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and the semantic web.

Over the past ten years, our research group has worked on a domain that we have called Digital Memory Traces. We specifically target individuals as creators and users of digital content, and we focus on their private, personal digital content, such as photographs, documents, bookmarks, music, and videos. In this paper, we introduce this domain and describe our ongoing precursor to a tool that facilitates the creation and sharing of personal digital content. Our tool is an open-source website that lets users manually link together various digital documents, effectively stating that the documents relate to the same personal content. For example, links associate multiple copies of a newspaper article with a concert program, a collection of photographs, a bookmark to a website containing a review, and a Word document describing the review.

Understanding Digital Memory Traces

I propose the Digital Memory Traces project (DMT), which is aimed at constituting and understanding the nature of memories mediated by digital technologies and augmenting the expressiveness of our digital memory. This project proposes to tackle this problem from a human-centered perspective, acknowledging the increasing relevance of memory studies and research on the use of digital technologies in the practice of personal memory. By addressing three key questions that arise from that vision, a new, broader platform for the creation and sharing of digital memory traces will emerge. A central aspect of the way in which technologies are created and used for personal memory practices is the focus on the trace that will last and be wielded to function as mnemonic devices. Current tools represent digital traces as 'flat' entities, where the weight is in their visual appearance and the ease of recall and sharing.

The work on memory and digital memory should focus on the full array of human capabilities—especially in creativity and serendipitous encounters—of digitally mediated memory. Rather than designing tools for remembering that focus only on efficiency and access to stored information, resulting in technological solutions that are simple and static, I propose digital memory traces that mimic the multidimensionality of our physical objects for human understanding and the provisions for encoding diverse attributes associated with memories, in order to support various processes such as selections and explorations in human memory. I believe that this new, broader platform, with a refreshed vision, will address the above challenges and constitute a modest step towards enabling us to engage in more sustainable practices of digital memory development so that we might continue to unlock the deep meanings that live inside.

Definition and Concept

Digital memory traces entitle digital fragments that bear information and/or meaning to an individual. This information and/or meaning are closely related to the events with which the individual is involved. Each digital memory trace, therefore, either represents some part or moment of the surrounding environment with explicit or implicit relevance to the individual, or conveys information of an emotional and/or feeling type towards this environment as well as the events. These intrinsic data are important in order to interpret the sense of each elaborate and store it. They store and organize story elements that accompanied the events and proved important enough to become a matter for concern and remembrance.

The concept of digital memory trace is abstracted: it includes delocated information situated in situations of practical or theoretical importance to an individual. It arises from the substance of any organized life and from the individual's distinctive nature to promote the organization of any experience. All the other classes of information or data need special forms of humor discrimination; at least one is strictly necessary for its relevance to be regarded as information memory, and the above-mentioned relevant characteristics are often a sufficient condition. Source mapping is then a powerful tool to search for the most informative data to be stored and organized into a digital memory trace's actual content, so that the memory trace owners themselves are justly commissioned to elaborate and store their property. Digital memory traces are composed of special informative data; better deposition and increase in quality of the memory traces are often implied from using specific information elicitation and deposition tools.

Historical Context

The project Digital Memory Traces (DMT) is generally driven by the double objective of activating existing collections and promoting the co-creation of new historical content at a community level. The founding idea was to use digital-born contemporary representations related to traditional spaces, by and for the communities that inhabit them, to document processes with heavy intangible value, to confront and interpret these levels, and to assist public planning decisions related to these processes in the contemporary world. The project was conceived in the orbit of the so-called Digital Humanities, a domain of methodological union between computer science, historiographic, and anthropological enterprises, oriented further into the construction of tools and methodologies for interrogating the large amount of ubiquitous sources linked to traditional historical spatial levels left on the web. This disciplinary convergence is driven by the increasing digitization of cultural, historical, and anthropological datasets.

The proposed experimentation is related to the Web 2.0 theme and the elaboration of a model that, thanks to the construction of a specifically structured social-semantic layer, utilizes some Web 3.0 principles. Therefore, the approach chosen is still quite innovative in some empirical beginnings and pioneering to the extent that it substitutes the traditional top-down expert-driven and scientific paradigm related to the construction and definition of knowledge within highly academic and specialized Digital Humanities domains with a more horizontal and community-driven one. The experiment projects and develops a prototype for a web-based 'Historication Cloud', facilitating direct user-generated contributions, collecting community-created primary research materials, culturally representative heritage assets, and exchanging basic knowledge. 'Web-based' is a new terminology coinage to denote web generations for the traditional and specialized definition frame currently covered in the Digital Humanities web context, while the other traditional motivation came from a somatosensory vision of user-generated contributions, collection organizations, and cultural intangible overlays.

Psychological Perspectives

It is important to dive into concepts that helped us understand the process of memory creation in photography in order to map these to practical guidelines and modules in a digital platform for creating and sharing digital memories. Memory creation is the process of learning from experiences that helps us understand and adapt to the environment we are living in. Learning can occur from simple experiences, from extensive personal life events, or vicarious events experienced through media, such as photography. Since memory is known to be constructive, personal, and social, technologies to augment memory must take these dimensions into account and stimulate the capture of memory traces that later help access both the events themselves and the learning process that occurred. To stimulate individual consideration and behavior, attention should be given to the kinds of learning that are important for building rich, enduring, and meaningful connections between people, locations, objects, and the events that involve them. Sociality is enhanced as well.

Awareness of the limitations of memory as a living record also needs to be corrected in today’s technology, where the capture of some digital traces related to learning from lived experience might be hindered by designs and interfaces. Designers who infuse technology with the sense-making necessary to help users capture useful memory traces can also stimulate the social sharing among users. Simultaneously improving and transcending connection to embodied experience can increase not only meaningfulness, but also the recall and reconstruction of events as well as the narrative that is shared. Providing reflection, appreciating the value of the wider learning context of personal memories and the importance of experiences in the physical setting are an opportunity when enhancing the capture of digital memories.