Digital Lives

Personal maps

My Digital Lives colleague Jamie Andrews, responsible at the library for literary manuscripts, sometimes sends me web links to online fiction that makes use of digital technology in interesting ways. A case in point is We Tell Stories, produced in association with Penguin. The story begins at St Pancras Railway Station, and then follows the principal character by means of Google Maps to the British Library and beyond. It is addictive: not at all conducive to efficient research project management.

Moving from fiction to nonfiction, here is an image of a GPS track that I made using a handheld GPS receiver. At first glance it might look like the route taken by someone who has lost his or her way after a British Library mingle event, but in fact it depicts the path taken as my family and I strolled through an open air museum in April - the National History Museum of Wales at St Fagans. Many original buildings from all over Wales have been carefully dismantled and reconstructed at the museum's parkland.

Here is a slightly more detailed view of our track. If one laid it over a detailed topographical map of the complex, it would be possible to surmise which exhibits we visited: even though it is near the limit of the precision of the consumer GPS.

Increasingly digital photographs are being created with time and place metadata embedded within them. Clearly this will be of great potential benefit to future archivists of digital photographs as well as raising some issues of privacy. Not only is GPS functionality being added to handheld devices such as the Blackberry, others such as the iPhone are using a location system based on the cell phone network. Many people will therefore have access to the potential to record their location.

We are exploring the integration of GPS information with digital photographs as part of the Digital Manuscripts Project at the British Library. Here are some pictures to whet your appetite (© Jeremy Leighton John all images including tracks).

Human Speechome Project

Following the earlier blog entry on Charles Fernyhough’s three year study of his daughter…

Another important study of child development using digital capture techniques is the Human Speechome Project at MIT Media Laboratory under the leadership of Dr Deb Roy. With his wife Rupal Patel, Deb Roy is following the development of their son at home using an impressive array of high quality microphones and video cameras embedded in strategic places throughout their home. The aim is to record 10 hours each day for the first three years of their son’s life. This pilot project has already logged more than 100,000 hours of audio and video and aims to reach 200,000 hours (1 petabyte) of high quality recordings. Significantly, the project is also developing sophisticated navigation, coding and analysis tools, allowing among other things the means to be able to transcribe and annotate the recordings efficiently: in particular, software called TotalRecall for Apple Mac OS X.

Dr Roy likewise has had to balance research benefits with privacy rights, stating: "There is no plan to distribute or publish the complete original recordings due to privacy considerations, although we will explore ways to work with other researchers by sharing appropriately coded and selected portions of the full corpus". A useful reference provided by Dr Roy is to the Child Language Data Exchange System component of the TalkBank System.

One thought in the context of Digital Lives is that with people increasingly capturing their lives and those of family members with digital technology, these recordings may become very useful resources for human and natural science. What they lack in scientific rigour and completeness they may make up for in the fact that they will exist in vast numbers. The potential is there but it requires a practical and acceptable equilibrium between the needs of research and privacy that can be sustained. 

Capturing a digital childhood

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.

Personal digital lives

Curators and archivists have long been in the position of reading other people’s letters and diaries, and needing to do so in a sensitive way. This might sometimes be four or five generations after the death of the eminent individual who wrote the letters, but increasingly curators of personal archives are dealing with living individuals and their immediate family. This is particularly so with personal eARCHIVES and eMANUSCRIPTS (the digital equivalent of personal papers found on computer tapes, floppy disks and hard drives), it being necessary to capture the information before it degrades or is simply lost through digital neglect or accident.

It is not easy for individuals and families as they ponder the uncertainties and vagaries of historical interpretation and future reputation. I sometimes point out to distinguished scientists and other originators that there is no definitive final account: where one biography may be unsympathetic, another will likely take a different view.

It is easily said, and it has occurred to me more than once that contemporary curators might learn from opening themselves to the same vulnerabilities, by revealing some of our own personal memories and sentiments. It would help us to feel even more strongly, the feelings of families and individuals as they consider what and how much of a personal archive to make available in the UK’s national library, and when to do so.

In this spirit, I shall occasionally share some of my personal experiences where these raise issues of relevance to the project. (Fittingly perhaps, there is a tradition in research of trying out experiments on oneself.)

Digital Lives progress and news

We are sorry that Neil Beagrie has left the British Library. Neil remains extremely active in the field of digital information, and is currently focussing on his digital consultancy role. We shall be continuing, of course, to discuss the project and its findings informally with him. We would like to take this opportunity, nonetheless, to record our gratitude to him for launching this exciting project.

Despite the absence of a Principal Investigator for some months, the research has continued apace. This progress is due to John Tuck who has been effectively leading the project in the interim, to the coinvestigators Katrina Dean and Ian Rowlands, and to the other team members (who have, for example, been arranging and conducting interviews).

(1) The interviewing of creators of personal digital collections has been completed, and Pete Williams has led an initial publication of this work in the online journal Ariadne: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/williams-et-al/

(2) The design of the quantitative survey questionnaire has been agreed, and the questionnaire has been released in a modest way. Its full launch is imminent.

(3) The user forum took place in January 2008 and an initial report has been drafted; this is to be sent to attendees for further comment before final release.

We are currently preparing a workshop to address legal and ethical issues associated with personal information.

Digital Lives: new Principal Investigator 01 April 2008

After almost four years, Neil Beagrie left the British Library on 7 December 2007, and consequently it has been necessary to appoint a new Principal Investigator.

Following an externally advertised competition for the vacant post in March 2008, Dr Jeremy Leighton John has been appointed Principal Investigator for the Digital Lives Research Project, effective from the beginning of April 2008.