The information retrieval challenge of human digital memories

Today people are storing increasing amounts of personal information in digital format. While storage of such information is becoming straight forward, retrieval from the vast personal archives that this is creating poses significant challenges. Existing retrieval techniques are good at retrieving from non-personal spaces, such as the World Wide Web. However they are not sufficient for retrieval of items from these new unstructured spaces which contain items that are personal to the individual, and of which the user has personal memories and with which has had previous interaction. We believe that there are new and exciting possibilities for retrieval from personal archives. Memory cues act as triggers for individuals in the remembering process, a better understanding of memory cues will enable us to design new and effective retrieval algorithms and systems for personal archives. Context data, such as time and location, is already proving to play a key part in this special retrieval domain, for example for searching personal photo archives, we believe there are many other rich sources of context that can be exploited for retrieval from personal archives

Embedded in These Walls

Embedded In These Walls uses photographic imagery, archival ephemera, and written text to examine a specific history of generational trauma through the lens of a singular family of a southern tradition to point to a larger systemic breakdown of accountability and truthfulness regarding abus

Integrating memory context into personal information re-finding

Personal information archives are emerging as a new challenge for information retrieval (IR) techniques. The user’s memory plays a greater role in retrieval from person archives than from other more traditional types of information collection (e.g. the Web), due to the large overlap of its content and individual human memory of the captured material. This paper presents a new analysis on IR of personal archives from a cognitive perspective. Some existing work on personal information management (PIM) has begun to employ human memory features into their IR systems. In our work we seek to go further, we assume that for IR in PIM system terms can be weighted not only by traditional IR methods, but also taking the user’s recall reliability into account. We aim to develop algorithms that combine factors from both the system side and the user side to achieve more effective searching. In this paper, we discuss possible applications of human memory theories for this algorithm, and present results from a pilot study and a proposed model of data structure for the HDMs achieves

Exploring Digital Elements for Visualizing Time in Personal Information Re-finding

Psychological theories on memory of time suggest that people naturally remember ‘events’ rather than the ‘dates’ and ‘hours’. These features are, however, usually required by computer applications for desktop search (information re-finding) tasks. This explains why ‘time’ features are not well remembered for desktop search, as reported in some studies. In order to improve on this situation, we proposed our iCLIPS browser interface, which enables user re-fining initial search results using a suggestive timeline, where visualization elements representing landmark events and important computer activities were displayed. These visual elements on the time line were expected to act as episodic memory cues to help users recollect their search target by recognizing their episodic context. This interface is built on top of a personal search engine providing a unified index of all the information a user has encountered or created, such as documents, web pages, email, and personal photos. We present a pilot study to explore the types of these visual. The result and suggestions for future main study were discussed

Family memories in the home: contrasting physical and digital mementos

We carried out fieldwork to characterise and compare physical and digital mementos in the home. Physical mementos are highly valued, heterogeneous and support different types of recollection. Contrary to expectations, we found physical mementos are not purely representational, and can involve appropriating common objects and more idiosyncratic forms. In contrast, digital mementos were initially perceived as less valuable, although participants later reconsidered this. Digital mementos were somewhat limited in function and expression, largely involving representational photos and videos, and infrequently accessed. We explain these digital limitations and conclude with design guidelines for digital mementos, including better techniques for accessing and integrating these into everyday life, allowing them to acquire the symbolic associations and lasting value that characterise their physical counterparts

The Cowl - v.81 - n.2 - Sep 15, 2016

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Vol 81 - No. 2 - September 15, 2016. 20 pages

My impossible dream.

The article presents the author's views on leisure studies. The author says, "I have always thought of myself as different. Different in the sense that while growing up I never, in my mind, seemed to fit into what society deemed "normal." For me this society was Southern California, home to movie stars and the latest fashion trends; the so-called "beautiful people." In the 1980s and 1990s, this society demanded a certain look that was anything but normal, and growing up in this shadow of influence, if you did not fit in "you knew it. It is still much the same today. Anywhere you go, advertisements and media coverage about beauty, diet and how to live bombard you. People who stand out are often targeted and made fun of for being and looking different from the ideal

Towards memory supporting personal information management tools

In this article we discuss re-retrieving personal information objects and relate the task to recovering from lapse(s) in memory. We propose that fundamentally it is lapses in memory that impede users from successfully re-finding the information they need. Our hypothesis is that by learning more about memory lapses in non-computing contexts and how people cope and recover from these lapses, we can better inform the design of PIM tools and improve the user's ability to re-access and re-use objects. We describe a diary study that investigates the everyday memory problems of 25 people from a wide range of backgrounds. Based on the findings, we present a series of principles that we hypothesize will improve the design of personal information management tools. This hypothesis is validated by an evaluation of a tool for managing personal photographs, which was designed with respect to our findings. The evaluation suggests that users' performance when re-finding objects can be improved by building personal information management tools to support characteristics of human memory