Following my previous blog entry...
Although my position as Principal Investigator of the project officially began at the beginning of April, at this time I was neither studiously leafing through tomes of research guidelines, nor carefully scrolling through project budget spreadsheets. In fact I was for a good part of that week, several hundred kilometres away, deep down meandering, high-hedged country lanes in west Wales showing my newborn son, Carwyn, to some of his relatives including his Mamgu (Welsh for grandmother).
At this time Carwyn was not yet smiling and so here is a photo taken of him some weeks later, when he was positively beaming (notice already the selective enhancement of the past) (© Jeremy Leighton John). 
A few nights ago as I lay in the dark listening to his milk-happy gurgling next to me, I realised that my wife and I do not have a single hard copy photograph of Carwyn (with the exception of the printouts of the ultrasound scans obtained before his birth). So far all his photos exist as digital images, as tiffs or jpegs.
And so begins a digital life.
My wife and I hope to digitally capture his childhood to a degree not possible even a few years ago, at least not so readily. But even with slightly more modern technology, I feel sure that we shall not be able to match the psychologist Charles Fernyhough (University of Durham), who stayed at home for the first seven years of his daughter Athena’s life. From her birth until she was three years old, he documented in extraordinary detail everything about her, recording “hundreds of hours of video footage, thousands of photographs and dozens of books’ worth of notes”: see the article in the Guardian newspaper by journalist Viv Groskop, 10 May 2008. See also Charles Fernyhough's own website.
Dr Fernyhough combines scientific curiosity and insight with eloquent awe and sensitivity in the face of the developing child and the experience of being a parent. It is clear too that he has grappled with the balance between the benefits of research and the needs for privacy.
“I wanted to treat the child as a phenomenon, as an amazing natural wonder – and to let that child speak for herself. But I was concerned that it would put her too much in the public gaze. She might turn round one day and say, ‘I wish you hadn’t done that.’ So I have talked to her at every stage. She likes the idea of having a record of her life. I can’t say she has given her full approval because she may change her mind – especially when she’s a teenager. But I hope she will recognise that it was done out of love and out of wonder” (quote from the article by Viv Groskop).
A curator could not have put it better. We juggle with these emotions, seeking the balance between wonder and privacy, between meeting the research imperative (with all its manifest and almost limitless benefits, over time) and the feelings and thoughts of the individuals represented in a personal archive.
I have stumbled across various Flickr streams that have taken 'digital lives' to an extreme, but probably not with Fernyhough's research interests in mind. The most fascinating one was a Korean couple whose stream was solely dedicated to their child. From the photos, he looked about four years old. There were in excess of 40,000 photos in their stream and, though the enormity of this archive meant I could not verify this, every photograph seemed to be of their child. There were multiple versions of the same moment documented, with minute variations, such as the boy bending slightly more towards the ground each time. From this evidence, it seemed like the couple (their Flickr profile had a photograph of them with their son) just uploaded every photograph from their camera, using Flickr as a comprehensive photo album of their son's first few years. Without broadband, this would have been impossible, or at least they might have been discouraged from the effort!
Sadly, I lost the bookmark when I changed computers, but it was one of the most remarkable things I've seen on the internet.
Posted by: Kevin O'Neill | 24 July 2008 at 08:52