Digitality

What does it mean to have your data in digital form?

Digital Family History as understood by Digital Natives with 500 IRL Facebook friends

It’s not the same thing as what Ye Olde Maiden Aunt used to collect and curate. An intriguing article by fellow Association of Personal Historians member Jane Lehman-Shafron, she notes the current trends (look! TV shows! Newspaper articles!), but also points out how family history in digital form is being used by the next generation, the Digital Natives who grow up immersed in computing technology.

The form that family history is taking changes with the times. 

Today’s younger generations are more interested in family history than ever before. The whole country is. But they are demanding that those maiden aunts (and all the rest of us who fulfill the function of “family historian”) get with the times. They want their family history accessible and they want it compelling.

Speaking as the maiden single Aunt whose spent a lot of time in the technology industry—I’m even called AuntiAlias—it’s a computer graphic pun (know what anti-aliasing is?), I’m one of those Aunts who is pushing everyone forward in digital pursuits when it comes to family history.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You gotta use digital tools to preserve your family’s history. I’ve said it so many times before. I’ll say it again, too. But this post isn’t about that.

What I like is the way that Lehman-Shafron draws the picture... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality • Genealogy • Personal History
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I’m following Digital Death Day today. Remotely

What happens to your bits after you die? That’s the premise behind the Digital Death Day unconference, currently in progress. (On twitter, check out the #ddd2010 hashtag). I’ll be posting provacative tweets and topics here on an ongoing basis.

Why does Family Oral History deal with digital death? The recordings of conversations that are saved in digital formats is the deliberate creation of digital bits that are meant to last longer than the speakers whose voices are recorded therein. It’s an edge-case of the central phenomenon explored at the conference. What happens to your bits once you die?

Here, in no particular order, are tweets from those in attendance, as a kind of thought-piece about the digital lives we have. Plus, for me, having experienced three deaths of people close to me in less than a year (and many more remote as friends’ parents shake off this mortal coil), it’s highly relevant.

• digitaldeathday Secret online lives are often revealed by a loved one’s death. #ddd2010
• digital_beyond Families don’t always understand how digital networks relate to their loved ones. #ddd2010
• digital_beyond What happens when you have a digital life that conflicts... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality • Longevity • Personal History
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Digital Death Day

What happens to your bits when you die? Digital Death Day takes place on May 20, 2010 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. It’s an unconference set to explore what happens when a person dies. What happens to your digital assets? How do you probate digital assets? What about jointly held digital assets? What happens to your digital avatars? What are the policies about your email account upon death?

Since this is an unconference, the exact agenda will be created the morning of the conference by attendees. Conference price is $75 before May 13, and $100 thereafter.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality
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Not your father’s iPod… well, actually it is (a Walkman)

For Sony Walkman’s 30th anniversary, 13-year old Scott Campbell tries it for a week. Hilarious for us oldsters to see our old fave equipment through a young-person’s eyes.

My dad had told me it was the iPod of its day.
He had told me it was big, but I hadn’t realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book.

Size? cumbersome. Handy belt-clip, but with that weight? (you hafta read the article to find out its effect for current 13 year olds).

When I wore it walking down the street or going into shops, I got strange looks, a mixture of surprise and curiosity, that made me a little embarrassed.

Though one teacher got nostalgic. Two tantalizing questions:

How long did it take for Campbell to figure out that there was a side B to this tape?

And how did he create his own impromptu “Shuffle” effect?

You hafta read the article to find out the answers.

A couple of pluses: two output jacks for sharing music with friends, and a power port to plug... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Audio • Audio: Hardware • Digitality • Longevity • Memorabilia
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London: Digital Lives Research Conference

Feb 9-11 in London: 1st Digital Lives Research Conference is from the project of interest to “individuals who wish to manage their own personal digital collections for family history, biographical or other purposes.”

There’s a blog associated with the Project/Conference. Have no idea if there’ll be postings from the conference, as the blog’s author, Jeremy John said, “My new year resolution is to blog more frequently.” (ahem, Jeremy. I can relate!)

Conference topics include:

• Digital Lifelines: Practicalities, Professionalities and Potentialities
  • Aspects of Digital Curation
  • Digital Economy and Philosophy
  • On the Monetary Value of Personal Digital Objects
  • Digital Preservation
  • Practical Experiences
  • Professional Matters Arising, Options for the Future and Resolutions

• Personal Information Lifecycles: Creator, Curator, Consumer

  • Personal Information Management and Usability
  • Forensics, Authenticity, Security and Digital Capture
  • Historical Research and Private Lives
  • Scientific Research with People
  • Towards Digital Biography
  • Legal and Ethical Issues
  • Creators’ Experiences, Anticipations and Thoughts
  • Writers in Conversation (OMG OMG that includes A.S. Byatt, a fave author of mine!)

• Living Online and Digital Archives in the Wild

  • iSCIENCE?
  • Web 2.0 & Cloud Computing
  •   iLITERATURE
  • Emerging Technologies
  • Digital Pens and Virtual Research Environments... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality
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Preserving Your Digital Memories

Digital Preservation -dot- gov’s What You Can Do page : highlights your biggest digital at-risk items: email, computer files, storage disks, digital files, and the needle-in-a digital haystack problem of finding what you want in a pile of digital material.

Preserving a digital object is not the same as preserving, say, a book or photograph. You can put a book on a shelf or a photo in a box and (if kept dry and safe) look at it 50 years later. The same is not true with a digital object. This is why, in many cases, digital materials are considered more fragile than physical ones.

OMG! You can take a DID YOU KNOW? quiz, too.*

*I took it. Missed one because I was thinking more of my own “don’t break the web” habits than, say, how quickly news stories disappear from news websites.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality
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Archiving Geospace

Kewl! UCSB Librarian Named “Pioneer of Digital Preservation” … by the Library of Congress. The pioneer? Larry Carver. At first glance (all I’ve taken), it looks like a cross between Google Earth and an über reference librarian.

“Geospatial technology in the context of libraries is to create software to search for information by pointing to a place on the Earth’s surface and — say using the Internet — ask what data, books, art, etc. is available for that spot or location. It searches by using longitude/latitude coordinates to look for information about that spot. So, the technology is a complex software that can search over millions of maps, aerial photographs, satellite imagery, or any other information that has location information in its metadata [catalog record].”

Okay, it has nothing to do with oral history. Unless you’ve got a project that calls on lat-long data. (latitude longitude)  But it’s cool cool cool.

From the Library of Congress’ site:

The geospatial collections are not limited to images. “The ADL [Alexandria Digital Library] engine is agnostic when it comes to data with geospatial coordinates,” said Carver. “It doesn’t have to be... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality
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CDs and DVDs: Tons of good info

The Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs, A guide for librarians and archivists. Found while researching the layer-cake sandwich of materials in an optical disk. Disk structure page. Did you know that the top side of a CD-R is thin and fragile? I mighta mentioned it before, but this underscores it, in a big way.

Also of note: the tests for aging and shelf-life of CDs and DVDs that you can burn yourself is that their pre-writing shelf life is limited to some 5 years or so. By all means, stock up, but don’t stock up too much.

Gold disks are the best. But that’s a topic for another post.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Archiving • Digitality • Longevity
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Motion picture sci/tech report on archiving

[updated] Hollywood Reporter reports that (the Oscar organization)’s Science/Tech council’s released 64-page report on archiving. From the looks of it, the limits of digital are being manifest. I’d like to look closer to see how much of an overlap there is for motion picture industry’s archiving existing work and how to preserve audio and visual recordings that are born digital.

Update [18 November]: I went to the web site and inquired if the paper was available. Not in downloadable form, but if I supplied my name and address, they’d send me a copy. I did. The paper just arrived. It’s 74 pages (full color, nice production!) I’ll give it a read and report on any findings relevant to people doing family oral history.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality • Longevity
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Family Visiting Headaches thanks to Digital Tools

At a family gathering, an internet cafe: “I wasn’t a house host anymore, I was running a Kinko’s. […] with a house brimming with guests, a cousin cornered me in my office with a multimedia challenge. She had brought a DVD made from family movies shot in the early 1930s. I was able to play it on my computer, but I ran aground trying to make a copy of it.”

Uh oh, I recognize myself there!

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality
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Tribal Linguistic History using Digital Tools

Chuksani-speaking Native Americans preserve language using military-tech translators. This is what happens when speakers of a nearly extinct language get their hands on the latest DoD-inspired smart electronic gadgets. [via Dangerousmeta]

Jane Wyatt, 62, of Coarsegold, and her sister, Holly, 65, were among six tribal members who gathered Friday across the street from the Picayune Rancheria’s busy Chukchansi Gold Resort & Casino in Coarsegold to try out a newly acquired “Phraselator.”

The electronic translator was developed just a few years ago from technology used for military translators, said Don Thornton of Thornton Media Inc., based in Banning. Thornton Media is working with 70 tribes in the United States and Canada to preserve native languages, he said.

“What’s my name?” he asked the box in his hand. He pressed another button and it replied in what Thornton said was Chukchansi.

The Wyatt sisters learned the unwritten Chukchansi language at home while they were growing up in the Madera County foothills. Chukchansi is one of many native California dialects considered to be nearly extinct.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality
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Compact Disc celebrates 25th birthday

First discs rolled off presses August 17, 1982. So, if digital lasts forever.. or 5 years, whichever comes first, CDs may (may!) last forever.

The news story follows the way that CDs changed the music industry.. the rise.. and, with other digital formats, the fall. But the part that interests me the most are the techno-geeky deets about how the CD came to be, well, the CD:

Yet it had been a risky technical endeavor to attempt to bring digital audio to the masses, said Pieter Kramer, the head of the optical research group at Philips’ labs in the Netherlands in the 1970s.

“When we started there was nothing in place,” he told The Associated Press at Philips’ corporate museum in Eindhoven.

The proposed semiconductor chips needed for CD players were to be the most advanced ever used in a consumer product. And the lasers were still on the drawing board when the companies teamed up in 1979.

In 1980, researchers published what became known as the “Red Book” containing the original CD standards, as... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Audio • Audio: Hardware • Digitality
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(UPDATED) Storyofmylife.com goes beta: Their Terms of Service Stopped Me Cold

The promise of storyofmylife.com is compelling. Store information about your life. Forever. They’re thinking way far ahead— they’ve established a non-profit foundation to store the stories in perpetuity. Sounds great. But I’m not going to use the site. (Well, beyond a quick signup and look see.) The Terms of Service has a big gotcha in it: You grant storyofmylife.com and its parent company, Eravita, a 6% (minimum) royalty of any money you make on the proceeds of any commercial creative endeavors of the story of your own life.

UPDATE: I heard from the site’s COO. They’ve changed the TOS and deleted the objectionable part. Continue reading the original post and, at the end, the relevant portion of email from Storyofmylife.com’s COO.

The TOS was brought to my attention by my friend Cynthia, who visited the site the first day it was open.

Today’s the first day I’ve had a chance to visit, and I’m rockin’ back on my heels. I’m scared to even sign up to see what is behind it. 

Here’s the part of their TOS in the big capital letters (side note: Why oh why does the most important stuff get printed in all caps, which, when presented in paragraph form, make the most important stuff the hardest to read?)

Note: They updated their TOS, view note at end of this post for more info. NOTWITHSTANDING ANYTHING HEREIN TO THE CONTRARY, USER HEREBY GRANTS TO ERAVITA, INC., A ROYALTY IN AN AMOUNT TO BE NEGOTIATED BUT CONSISTING IN NO EVENT OF LESS THAN 6% OF THE PROCEEDS DERIVED BY USER FROM THE COMMERCIAL EXPLOITATION (WHETHER IN THE FORM OF A... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality • Family History Software • Longevity • Personal History
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Digitization Resources

I could spend a good, long day getting lost in these Digitization Resources links by Hurst Associates at Digitization 101. From a workshop Jill Hurst-Wahl led at the Comptuers in Libraries conference.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality • Links • Longevity
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The Lost last 20 years; and a plea for paper (!!!)

1980-2000 has disappeared into the ether. Sorry. The history that’s being written right now does not have this kind of sensory fulness (if it’s being saved at all): “I have recently spent many hours in the National Archives, ferreting through the wartime records of MI5. The sheer richness of written material is overwhelming: letters, memos, telephone transcripts, diaries, scribbled notes in the margins. You can smell the pipe smoke and personalities wafting off the pages.”

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digitality • Longevity
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