Making history: intentional capture of future memories

Lifelogging' technology makes it possible to amass digital data about every aspect of our everyday lives. Instead of focusing on such technical possibilities, here we investigate the way people compose long-term mnemonic representations of their lives. We asked 10 families to create a time capsule, a collection of objects used to trigger remembering in the distant future. Our results show that contrary to the lifelogging view, people are less interested in exhaustively digitally recording their past than in reconstructing it from carefully selected cues that are often physical objects. Time capsules were highly expressive and personal, many objects were made explicitly for inclusion, however with little object annotation. We use these findings to propose principles for designing technology that supports the active reconstruction of our future past

Signifying the autobiographical memory on social media a semiotic analysis of food-themed imagery on Instagram

Dissertation (MA (Digital Culture & Media Studies))--University of Pretoria, 2021.During the last decade, digitisation has become a pervasive influence on social culture, a trend largely due to the widespread emergence inter-alia, of the Internet, personal computers, smartphones and other devices as affordable and effective means of mass digital communication. As people spend more time online, their interactions, behaviours, sense of self and self-representation are progressively shaped and influenced by their social media engagements and the social context in which online users and their digital interactions are embedded (Framroze 2017). Social networking sites have become a principal avenue of self-expression and representation (Rettberg 2014); a digital space to share one’s unique life narrative through the use of images and words, enabling new and creative opportunities for self-expression and memory creation. One core element of our contemporary lifestyles increasingly influenced by digitisation, is that of food - the most basic and fundamental element of human nourishment and survival. Accompanying the increasing prevalence of digital media in society is the simultaneous acknowledgement of the “complex entanglements between the digital realm, and food” to the extent that food and food culture have become firmly entrenched as mainstream features of contemporary digital culture (Lewis 2018:3). As such, food-themed imagery shared within the digital space constitutes a worthwhile focus for enquiry to enhance the understanding of self-representation and autobiographical memory. This study explores the phenomena of food and food-culture and investigates how social media users utilise the online space to express their self-identity and to catalogue their autobiographical experiences and memories. To do so, I apply a semiotic analysis to a data set of online images selected from three Instagram hashtag categories. In conducting a semiotic analysis of various posts shared on Instagram, it is confirmed that food-themed images form an inherent part of a user’s self-identity and autobiographical memory. The study applied semiotic analysis to review a data set of food-themed images posted across three Instagram hashtag trends (#foodiesofinstagram, #foodmemories and #homechef). The semiotic analysis exhibited how individuals utilise food-themed digital imagery as a form of self-expression; as a platform to share, communicate and engage with memories and experiences that connotate meaningful symbolism and interpretation. Connotations included, for example, notions of wholesome, healthy and natural living (Fig. 26), cultural authenticity (Fig. 29), familial warmth and cultural familiarity (Fig. 33). These connotations were considered as an extension of a user’s sense of self and autobiographical memory. The conclusions identify how in the contemporary digital age, users’ embodied food-themed experiences and memories are being extended into the digital realm.Visual ArtsMA (Digital Culture & Media Studies)Unrestricte

Exploring narrative presentation for large multimodal lifelog collections through card sorting

Using lifelogging tools, personal digital artifacts are collected continuously and passively throughout each day. The wealth of information such an archive contains on our life history provides novel opportunities for the creation of digital life narratives. However, the complexity, volume and multimodal nature of such collections create barriers to achieving this. Nine participants engaged in a card-sorting activity designed to explore practices of content reduction and presentation for narrative composition. We found the visual modalities to be most fluent in communicating experience with other modalities serving to support them and that the users employed the salient themes of the story to organise, arrange and facilitate filtering of the content

What do people want from their lifelogs?

The practice of lifelogging potentially consists of automatically capturing and storing a digital record of every piece of information that a person (lifelogger) encounters in their daily experiences. Lifelogging has become an increasingly popular area of research in recent years. Most current lifeloggiing research focuses on techniques for data capture or processing. Current applications of lifelogging technology are usually driven by new technology inventions, creative ideas of researchers, or the special needs of a particular user group, e.g. individuals with memory impairment. To the best of our knowledge, little work has explored potential lifelogs applications from the perspective of the desires of the general public. One of the difficulties of carrying out such a study is the balancing of the information given to the subject regarding lifelog technology to enable them to generate realistic ideas without limiting or directing their imaginations by providing too much specific information. We report a study in which we take a progressive approach where we introduce lifelogging in three stages, and collect the ideas and opinions of a volunteer group of general public participants on techniques for lifelog capture, and applications and functionality

Scaffolding Memory: themes, taxonomies, puzzles

Through a selective historical, theoretical, and critical survey of the uses of the concept of scaffolding over the past 30 years, this chapter traces the development of the concept across developmental psychology, educational theory, and cognitive anthropology, and its place in the interdisciplinary field of distributed cognition from the 1990s. Offering a big-picture overview of the uses of the notion of scaffolding, it suggests three ways to taxonomise forms of scaffolding, and addresses the possible criticism that the metaphor of scaffolding retains an overly individualist vision of cognition. The chapter is aimed at a broad interdisciplinary audience interested in processes of learning, teaching, and apprenticeship as they apply to the study of memory

Life editing: Third-party perspectives on lifelog content

Lifelog collections digitally capture and preserve personal experiences and can be mined to reveal insights and understandings of individual significance. These rich data sources also offer opportunities for learning and discovery by motivated third parties. We employ a custom-designed storytelling application in constructing meaningful lifelog summaries from third-party perspectives. This storytelling initiative was implemented as a core component in a university media-editing course. We present promising results from a preliminary study conducted to evaluate the utility and potential of our approach in creatively interpreting a unique experiential dataset

Harvesting Context and Mining Emotions Related to Olfactory Cultural Heritage

UIDB/00657/2020 UIDP/00657/2020This paper presents an Artificial Intelligence approach to mining context and emotions related to olfactory cultural heritage narratives, particularly to fairy tales. We provide an overview of the role of smell and emotions in literature, as well as highlight the importance of olfactory experience and emotions from psychology and linguistic perspectives. We introduce a methodology for extracting smells and emotions from text, as well as demonstrate the context-based visualizations related to smells and emotions implemented in a novel smell tracker tool. The evaluation is performed using a collection of fairy tales from Grimm and Andersen. We find out that fairy tales often connect smell with the emotional charge of situations. The experimental results show that we can detect smells and emotions in fairy tales with an F1 score of 91.62 and 79.2, respectively.publishersversionpublishe