ging could permanently change how
we use and share personal data, enabling us to look back over our lives
or search through and organize past
experiences. It could help us find lost
objects, recall names, retrieve details
in documents, and review discussions
in meetings. It might also offer new
ways of sharing data with those we
care about or offer up data to interested parties. While there are knotty
privacy and security implications (a
huge topic, not addressed here), the
potential benefits warrant substantial
programs of research and development. The vision is indeed compelling. Some proponents have even said
that new technologies could give each
of us a comprehensive set of “digital
memories” to augment or even replace their biological counterparts. 2
But how sound are these goals?
What benefits would the effort bring
us? In reflecting on these questions
we see we need a more focused and
human-centered research agenda to
realize the grand ambition. This, in
turn, entails moving away from an obsession with “capturing everything” to
a more precise specification of what
it means to support human memory,
leading to specific systems and concrete design implications.
was created, who it came from, and its
relationships with other objects), making it easier to re-find information (such
as Dumais et al. 10).
However, today’s lifelogging vision
extends beyond the mere storage of
desktop objects. Just as we can capture
and collect personal interactions with
documents, we can capture activities
away from the computer, out of the of-
fice, in the everyday world. Key to it all
is that many everyday activities can be
captured automatically and compre-
hensively through digital tools that
allow us to not only store important
content, but also contextual details of
the activities to help access the content
later. Note that we distinguish between
lifelogging and other more deliberate
activities involving the capture of per-
sonal data (such as digital photography
and blogging) that involve the effortful
selective capture and display of digital
materials for a particular audience. In
contrast, lifelogging seeks to be effort-
less and all-encompassing in terms of
data capture.
history
Despite the recent upsurge of interest,
lifelogging systems are not new. They
can be traced back to Vannevar Bush’s
1945 “Memex” vision (a sort of desk)
supporting the archiving, searching,
and indexing of personal information
stores revolving around documents
with which we interact. 7 Since then, it
has inspired many different systems,
though mainly in research laboratories.
Early forays were close to the original
vision, confined to capturing digital objects within an integrated system. Both
past11 and present12 examples are in fact
infrastructures for storing collections of
heterogeneous digital objects that users
generate or encounter, including documents, photos, Web pages, and email.
And as infrastructures have developed,
so too have the tools for searching,
browsing, and retrieving information
from the collections. The tools often
make use of metadata about the various
aspects of an object’s past context, or
provenance (such as when and where it
Vannevar Bush’s 1945 “memex” vision.