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SXSWi: You’re Dead, Your Data Isn’t: What Happens Now?

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This five person panel at SXSW Interactive 2011 tackled a broad range of issues related to what happens to our online presence, assets, creations and identity after our death.

Presenters:

There was a lot to take in here. You can listen to the full audio of the session or watch a recording of the session’s live stream (the first few minutes of the stream lacks audio).

A quick and easy place to start is this lovely little video created as part of the promotion of Your Digital Afterlife – it gives a nice quick overview of the topic:

Also take a look at the Visual Map that was drawn by Ryan Robinson during the session – it is amazing! Rather than attempt to recap the entire session, I am going to just highlight the bits that most caught my attention:

Laws, Policies and Planning
Currently individuals are left reading the fine print and hunting for service specific policies regarding access to digital content after the death of the original account holder. Oklahoma recently passed a law that permits estate executors to access the online accounts of the recently deceased – the first and only state in the US to have such a law. It was pointed out during the session that in all other states, leaving your passwords to your loved ones is you asking them to impersonate you after your death.

Facebook has an online form to report a deceased person’s account – but little indication of what this action will do to the account. Google’s policy for accessing a deceased person’s email requires six steps, including mailing paper documents to Mountain View, CA.

There is a working group forming to create model terms of service – you can add your name to the list of those interested in joining at the bottom of this page.

What Does Ownership Mean?
What is the status of an individual email or digital photo? Is it private property? I don’t recall who mentioned it – but I love the notion of a tribe or family unit owning digital content. It makes sense to me that the digital model parallel the real world. When my family buys a new music CD, our family owns it – not the individual who happened to go to the store that day. It makes sense that an MP3 purchased by any member of my family would belong to our family. I want to be able to buy a Kindle for my family and know that my son can inherit my collection of e-books the same way he can inherit the books on my bookcase.

Remembering Those Who Have Passed
How does the web change the way we mourn and memorialize people? Many have now had the experience of learning of the passing of a loved one online – the process of sorting through loss in the virtual town square of Facebook. How does our identity transform after we are gone? Who is entitled to tag us in a photo?

My family suffered a tragic loss in 2009 and my reaction was to create a website dedicated to preserving memories of my cousin. At the Casey Feldman Memories site, her friends and family can contribute memories about her. As the site evolved, we also added a section to preserve her writing (she was a journalism student) – I kept imagining the day when we realized that we could no longer access her published articles online. I built the site using Omeka and I know that we have control over all the stories and photos and articles stored within the database.

It will be interesting to watch as services such as Chronicle of Life spring up claiming to help you “Save your memories FOREVER!”. They carefully explain why they are a trustworthy digital repository and why they backup their claims with a money-back guarantee.

For as little as $10, you can preserve your life story or daily journal forever: It allows you to store 1,000 pages of text, enough for your complete autobiography. For the same amount, you could also preserve less text, but up to 10 of your most important photos. – Chronicle of Life Pricing

Privacy
There are also some interesting questions about privacy and the rights of those who have passed to keep their secrets. Facebook currently deletes some parts of a profile when it converts it to a ‘memorial’ profile. They state that this is for the privacy of the original account holder. If users are ultimately given more power over the disposition of their social web presence – should these same choices be respected by archivists? Or would these choices need to be respected the way any other private information is guarded until some distant time after which it would then be made available?

Conculsion
Thanks again to all the presenters – this really was one of the best sessions for me at SXSWi! I loved that it got a whole different community of people thinking about digital preservation from a personal point of view. You may also want to read about Digital Death Day – one coming up in May 2011 in the San Francisco Bay Area and another in September 2011 in the Netherlands.

Image credit: Excerpt from Ryan Robinson’s Visual Map created live during the SXSW session.

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SXSW Interactive: Data and Revelations

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I am typing on a laptop in the Samsung blogger lounge at SXSW. Given this easy opportunity to blog, I wanted to share the overarching theme for my experience so far (3 days in) to SXSW Interactive. Data. It is all about data. APIs exposing data. People visualizing data. Using data to make business and policy decisions. Graphing data to keep track of web site and application performance. Privacy of data. Crowdsourcing data. Data about social media behavior. And on and on!

It has been a common thread I have traced from session to session, conversation to conversation. I expect someone with less of a database and metadata fixation might see something else as the overall meme, but I have a purse full of cards pointing me to new data sources and a notebook full of URLs to track down later to defend my view.

I keep catching myself giving mini-lessons on archives and preservation of electronic records like some sort of envoy from another universe. While I feel like a strong overall tech person at an archives conference, I feel like a data and visualization person here. This morning two of my sessions were over in the same hotel that SAA in Austin was hosted in and it was strange to be in that hotel with such a different group of people. I have managed to connect with an assortment of digital humanities folks. Someone even managed to find space for and plan an informal event for tomorrow night: Innovating and Developing with Libraries, Archives, and Museums.

My list of tech to learn (HTML5, NoSQL) and projects to contemplate and move forward (mostly ideas for visualizations using all the data everyone is sharing) is getting longer by the hour. It has been a process to figure out how to get the most I can out of SXSW. It is definitely more a space for inspiration than for deep diving into specifics. Letting go of the instinct that I am supposed to ‘learn new skills’ at a conference is fabulous!

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Heading to Austin for SXSW Interactive

Anyone out there going to be at SXSWi? I would love to find like-minded DH (digital humanities) and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) folks in Austin. If you can’t go, what do you wish I would attend and blog about after the fact?

No promises on thoroughness of my blogging of course. I never have mastered the ‘live blogging’ approach, but I do enjoy taking notes and if the past is any guide to the future I usually manage at least 2 really detailed posts on sessions from any one conference. The rest end up being notes to myself that I always mean to somehow go back to and post later. Maybe I need to spend a month just cleaning up and posting old session summaries (or at least those that still seem interesting and relevant!).

Drop me a comment below or contact me directly and let me know if you will be in Austin between March 10 and 15. Hope to see some of you there!

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Creative Funding for Text-Mining and Visualization Project

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The Hip-Hop word count project on Kickstarter.com caught my eye because it seems to be a really interesting new model for funding a digital humanities project. You can watch the video below – but the core of the project tackles assorted metadata from 40,000 rap songs from 1979 to the present including stats about each song (word count, syllables, education level, etc), individual words, artist location and date. This information aims to become a public online almanac fueled by visualizations.

I am a backer of this project, and you can be too. As of the original writing of this post, they are currently 47% funded twenty-eight days out from their deadline. For those of you not familiar with Kickstarter, people can post creative projects and provide rewards for their funders. The funding only goes through if they reach their goal within the time limit – otherwise nothing happens, a model they call ‘all-or-nothing funding’.

What will the money be spent on?

  • 45% for PHP programmers who have been coding the custom web interface
  • 35% for interface designers
  • 10% for data acquisition & data clean up
  • 10% for hosting bills

They aim for a five month time-line to move from their existing functional prototype to something viable to release to the public.

I am also intrigued by ways that the work on this project might be leveraged in the future to support similar text-mining projects that tie in location and date. How about doing the same thing with civil war letters? How about mining the lyrics from Broadway musical songs?

If this all sounds interesting, take a look at the video below and read more on the Hip-Hop Word Count Kickstarter home page. If half the people who follow my RSS feed pitch in $10, this project would be funded. Take a look and consider pitching in. If this project doesn’t speak to you – take a look around Kickstarter for something else you might want to support.

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Support EAD Tagging Research

In case you haven’t seen this request via other channels, please consider supporting the research effort described below into how different organizations encode finding aids using EAD. As someone who has dug into the gory details of eleven institutions’ finding aids to extract data for my ArchivesZ project, I am here to tell you that this work is VERY important. With better standards in place we will have a better foundation upon which to create interesting new tools and services to support archivists and researchers.

Is part of your job is to encode finding aids in EAD? Then please ask if you can send a dozen of them to the researchers on this project!

Seeking EAD records from repositories that have implemented EAD

Standards have been entering the archival lexicon at a fast pace to ensure data reliability, enable data aggregation, and manage data over the long term. However, we have not yet examined the use of these standards across the archival community. As we move into the next phase of standards-creation, a broad look at current implementations will help to inform the next generation of these standards. To do this, Kathy Wisser (Simmons College) and Jackie Dean (UNC Chapel Hill) are conducting research on EAD tag usage in the encoding community.

This project is intended to inform the TS-EAD revision process of the standard, and results will be disseminated through traditional publication avenues.

We are seeking a sample of encoded finding aids from institutions that have implemented EAD. If you are willing to participate in this project, please submit via electronic mail 12 to 15 finding aids to eadtagresearch@gmail.com by December 15, 2010.

The goal of the project is to identify encoding behavior and not to evaluate the quality of the encoding or the content of the finding aid. We will be noting the presence and absence of elements and attributes and the way that elements are used within the context of an EAD instance.

All results will be anonymized; no institution-specific information will be linked to the results. Institutions willing to participate will be acknowledged.

In order to obtain an accurate account of the use of the standard, we are looking for EAD instances from as many institutions as possible. We hope you will consider contributing to this effort.

If you have any questions about the project, please contact:

  • Kathy Wisser (Simmons College – wisser@simmons.edu)
  • Jackie Dean (UNC Chapel Hill – jdean@email.unc.edu)
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Blog Action Day: Flickr Commons Images of Acquiring Water

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Water in Bengal
Water in Benal (1944)

In honor of this year’s Blog Action Day theme of Water, I wanted to share some stunning images from the Flickr Commons. The images I have selected, contributed by cultural heritage institutions from around the world, show methods of transportation or acquisition of water. I will let the images speak for themselves below, but next time you go to turn on the tap water in your home – think of all of those for whom getting water is a huge challenge each and every day. While most of the images below are from decades ago, easy access to safe, clean water is still a current issue. Please consider supporting an organization like Charity: Water, a non-profit organization bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. 100% of public donations directly fund water projects.

And now.. the photos!

Summer scene, N.Y. - drinking water from street pump (LOC)
1910: Drinking Water from Street Pump, NY
Catskill aqueduct. ... Contract 58. March 4, 1913.
1913, Catskill Aqueduct
Filling an Indian pot with water from the cart
1918, Central France, Filling pot with water from a cart
[Native girls, Marken Island, Holland] (LOC)
1890: Native Girls in Holland
Ways of using a divining rod (LOC)
1910: Ways of using a divining rod
Alice Thompson, Besoco, West Virginia, Is Shown with Milk Bottles Her Neighbors Furnish Her Water with after Her Water Lines Were Cut Off. She Is Divorced From a Coal Miner Who Was Imprisoned for Killing a Man 04/1974
1974: Alice Thompson, Besoco, West Virginia, Is Shown with Milk Bottles Her Neighbors Furnish Her Water with after Her Water Lines Were Cut Off. She Is Divorced From a Coal Miner Who Was Imprisoned for Killing a Man
Faro Caudill drawing water from his well, Pie Town, New Mexico (LOC)
1940: Faro Caudill drawing water from his well, Pie Town, New Mexico

 

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Breast Cancer: Join the Army of Women & Help Scientists Find the Cause

In honor of the Army of Women Day, my post today takes a quick look at how the American public  has been delivered various messages about cancer via posters and PSAs.

These two 1930s posters from the Library of Congress focus their message on convincing women to seek treatment from their doctor quickly and not fight their cancer alone.

By the 70s we got PSAs from organizations like the American Cancer Society, focusing on not smoking, doing self-exams and seeing your doctor for ‘regular cancer check-ups’. The clip below features Farrah Fawcett in 1981 (25 years before her own cancer diagnosis):

Almost 30 years later we have a new kind of video appeal. The Army of Women, a program of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, funded by a grant from the Avon Foundation for Women, is recruiting 1,000,000 women (and men!) of all ages and ethnicities to participate in studies to find the cause of breast cancer. Their PSA below recasts the challenge. Now, instead of living a healthy lifestyle and then seeking out doctors for diagnosis and treatment – we are asked to join forces with others to support doctors in their research the cause of breast cancer.

I lost my aunt to breast cancer. I have more friends and family who have fought breast cancer than I can count on one hand. I joined the Army of Women over a year ago.

What can you do?

  • If you are over 18, sign up to join the Army of Women database. The first step is to add your name to the pool of individuals willing to be contacted to hear about research projects in the future. It is free. You are not agreeing to participate in any specific project, just adding yourself to the list so researchers can find the subjects they need as fast as possible.
  • Invite your friends and family to join.

Help us reach a day when the only way that a woman can learn about what it was like to have breast cancer is from memoirs, documentaries and tear-jerker movies. I want to put cancer in the archives (forgive me.. couldn’t resist it!).

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SAA2010: SEO and Archives Websites

Just a quick reminder that I will be presenting tomorrow morning at SAA2010 on the topic of search engine optimization and archives websites. I am part of session 502 officially titled Not on Google? It Doesn’t Exist: Findability and Search Engine Optimization for Archives. My specific portion of the presentation is titled ‘Building Archives Websites That Google Will Love’ and will be a general introduction to SEO concepts and why they are important to those involved in the creation of websites for archives and other cultural heritage institutions. It will include some basic tips and techniques.

My two co-presenters, Matt Herbison and Mark Matienzo, will discuss more in depth issues related to website architecture, URLs and increasing links back into your website. We hope you can join us, even though our session is during the less than pleasant 8am Saturday morning time slot. I will be posting my slides after our session and linking to them from my presentations page. I plan to pick up some donuts to sweeten the deal!

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ArchivesZ Needs You!

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I got a kind email today asking “Whither ArchivesZ?”. My reply was: “it is sleeping” (projects do need their rest) and “I just started a new job” (I am now a Metadata and Taxonomy Consultant at The World Bank) and “I need to find enthusiastic people to help me”. That final point brings me to this post.

I find myself in the odd position of having finished my Master’s Degree and not wanting to sign on for the long haul of a PhD. So I have a big project that was born in academia, initially as a joint class project and more recently as independent research with a grant-funded programmer, but I am no longer in academia.

What happens to projects like ArchivesZ? Is there an evolutionary path towards it being a collaborative project among dispersed enthusiastic individuals? Or am I more likely to succeed by recruiting current graduate students at my former (and still nearby) institution? I have discussed this one-on-one with a number of individuals, but I haven’t thrown open the gates for those who follow me here online.

For those of you who have been waiting patiently, the ArchivesZ version 2 prototype is avaiable online. I can’t promise it will stay online for long – it is definitely brittle for reasons I haven’t totally identified. A few things to be aware of:

  • when you load the main page, you should see tags listed at the bottom – if you don’t at all, then drop me an email via my contact form and I will try and get Tomcat and Solr back up. If you have a small screen – you may need to view your browser full screen to get to all the parts of the UI.
  • I know there are lots of bugs of various sizes. Some paths through the app work – some don’t. Some screens are just placeholders. Feel free to poke around and try things – you can’t break it for anyone else!

I think there are a few key challenges to building what I would think of as the first ‘full’ version of ArchivesZ – listed here in no particular order:

  • In the process of creating version 2, I was too ambitious. The current version of ArchivesZ has lots of issues, some usability – some bugs (see prototype above!)
  • Wherever a collaborative workspace of ArchivesZ were going to live, it would need large data sets. I did a lot of work on data from eleven institutions in the spring of 2009, so there is a lot of data available – but it is still a challenge.
  • A lot of my future ideas for ArchivesZ are trapped in my head. The good news is that I am honestly open to others’ ideas for where to take it in the future.
  • How do we build a community around the creation of ArchivesZ?

I still feel that there is a lot to be gained by building a centralized visualization tool/service through which researchers and archivists could explore and discover archival materials. I even think there is promise to a freestanding tool that supports exploration of materials within a single institution. I can’t build it alone. This is a good thing – it will be a much better in the end with the input, energy and knowledge of others. I am good at ideas and good at playing the devil’s advocate. I have lots of strength on the data side of things and visualization has been a passion of mine for years. I need smart people with new ideas, strong tech skills (or a desire to learn) and people who can figure out how to organize the herd of cats I hope to recruit.

So – what can you do to help ArchivesZ? Do you have mad Action Script 3 skills? Do you want to dig into the scary little ruby script that populates the database? Maybe you prefer to organize and coordinate? You have always wanted to figure out how a project like this could group from a happy (or awkward?) prototype into a real service that people depend on?

Do you have a vision for how to tackle this as a project? Open source? Grant funded? Something else clever?

Know any graduate students looking for good research topics? There are juicy bits here for those interested in data, classification, visualization and cross-repository search.

I will be at SAA in DC in August chairing a panel on search engine optimization of archival websites. If there is even just one of you out there who is interested, I would cheerfully organize an ArchivesZ summit of some sort in which I could show folks the good, bad and ugly of the prototype as it stands. Let me know in the comments below.

Won’t be at SAA but want to help? Chime in here too. I am happy to set up some shared desktop tours of whatever you would like to see.

PS: Yes, I do have all the version 2 code – and what is online at the Google Code ArchivesZ page is not up to date. Updating the ArchivesZ website and uploading the current code is on my to do list!

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Gridworks: Super Data Cleanup and Exploration Tool

In my presentation at the Spring 2010 Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC), Whirlwind Tour of Visualization-Land,  I showed some screenshots of a tool called Gridworks. At the time, Gridworks was not available to the general public. The good news is that earlier this month Gridworks 1.0 was officially released and you can get Gridworks right now.

For those of you who didn’t see my presentation, Gridworks is tool you run locally on your computer via a web browser. It permits you to load ‘grid-shaped data’ for examination, filtering and data cleanup. That makes is sound so much less exciting than it is. The best way to get a sense of what you can do is to watch the Gridworks Videos.

What sort of data do I think there is in archives to be pumped into Gridworks? How about collection descriptive data and electronic record datasets? Since all the data is kept locally, you don’t need to worry about uploading your data to some anonymous server in order to work with it. It all stays safely on your local computer the whole time.

A quick list of things that Gridworks can do:

  • Cluster data to find values that are almost the same so you can normalize your data (for example – NYC vs N.Y.C.)
  • Create instant facetted browsing based on any column in your data
  • Provide scatterplots of the values from any two numeric columns as well as a way to spot the most interesting combinations across many possible columns
  • Reconcilliation and validation of values based on data from within Freebase.com
  • Pull data from Freebase.com based on a matched column – such as the population of a country, if you have a column in your dataset with country specified
  • Splitting data within a cell based on a specified delimiter
  • Application of regular expressions and other simple code to data to create new columns

This list just scratches the surface, but it should give you a decent idea of the power of Gridworks. Even if the only feature you ever use is the one which lets you cluster and update your data to remove the ‘almost the same’ values, Gridworks can save you hours of painstaking data cleanup.

Why is data cleanup exciting? Because once you have nice clean data with all the attributes that are usefull to have for your data set – then you can start playing with the data in visualization tools! So go watch some Gridworks Videos, get Gridworks for yourself and start playing with data. It is free and it makes working with data fun!

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