#EngravedEmotion

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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.