Assessing the value of brief automated biographies

Abstract

New systems have been introduced that support the visualisation and sharing of personal digital data, but relatively little work has been done to establish how such systems support reminiscence and personal reflection. In this paper, we explore Intel's Museum of Me, a tool that collates and presents Facebook data in the form of a virtual museum, by asking how such an automated biography might support personal reflection and a process of life review. We supported users in their creation of personal virtual museums and interviewed them about their experiences, using a theoretical framework that highlighted the importance of personal narratives and life review in identity formation and psychological well-being. Our participants enjoyed the experience and welcomed the opportunity for reminiscence, but considered their resulting videos to be rather shallow representations of self, reflective of some of the more trivial exchanges and relationships that can come to dominate social media. We argue that social media in its current form is not well suited to support a meaningful life-review process.

A life story in three parts: the use of triptychs to make sense of personal digital data

“…For individuals, this results in growing archives of material that are often fragmented across different websites, yet issues may arise when people wish to forget and remove certain content [2]. Social media companies are well aware of the value of these data archives, but mechanisms that support meaningful reflection or re-interpretation of a user's personal digital data are minimal [3]. Inspired by 'slow technology' principles, we are involved in a large research project that explores new ways to repackage personal digital data to better support the processes of reflection, reminiscence and identity management.…”

“…18], the difficulties and flaws in these biographies are far more evident than the successes. In Thomas and Briggs [3], participants wanted more ownership of the content and more of an opportunity to take an active role in the narration process. Furthermore, the process of creating a film gave a sense of creepiness more akin to a eulogy than a celebration of the life of the subject.…”

“…It makes sense, then, to assume that some of these digital sensemaking tools would be welcome, but users often express reservations about the kinds of automated biographies that result from existing systems. Automated social media content from services such as Intel's Museum of Me offer only shallow representations of self [3], but some automated biographical services do allow the transformation of digital data into a physical artefact. In an earlier study exploring this transformation [17], participants were introduced to the online service 'MySocialBook', a platform that enables people to curate Facebook data into a scrapbook which is then printed.…”

Reminiscence through the Lens of Social Media

“…Many people actively store valuable images and communications, with the assumption that they will remain indefinitely. As well as repositories for valued content, social media sites such as Facebook have also proliferated in recent years with methods of summarization of our digital data, playing this back to us in ‘brief automated biographies’ (Thomas and Briggs, 2015). This work identified issues with a ‘distant biographer,’ however, with content collated by others seemingly too creepy and disengaged for its viewer.…”

“…These processes raise the question of just how selective social media is when presenting content, and how well designed such systems are in terms of their ability to support functional reminiscence. For some time, technologies have been capable of managing the shape of our memories (Tsai et al, 2014) and new academic work in this space includes the use of lifelogging wearables to capture key moments in an individual’s day (Chowdhury et al, 2015), the use of automated biographies to capture and display personal narratives and identities (Thomas and Briggs, 2015), and the adaptation of websites such as Pinterest to curate and present material in support of inter-generational reminiscence (Brewer, 2015). …”