Pensieve

Abstract

Reminiscing is a valuable activity that people of all ages spontaneously and informally partake in as part of their everyday lives. This paper discusses the design and use of Pensieve, a system that supports everyday reminiscence by emailing memory triggers to people that contain either social media content they previously created on third-party websites or text prompts about common life experiences. We discuss how the literature on reminiscence informed Pensieve's design, then analyze data from 91 users over five months. We find that people value spontaneous reminders to reminisce as well as the ability to write about their reminiscing. Shorter, more general triggers draw more responses, as do triggers containing people's own photosalthough responses to photos tended to contain more metadata elements than storytelling elements. We compare these results to data from a second, Pensieve-like system developed for Facebook, and suggest a number of important aspects to consider for both designers and researchers around technology and reminiscence.

Playful Backstalking and Serious Impression Management

“…Archived digital data offer a number of valuable features, such as enabling a digital baby book for young parents [31] or supporting reminiscence through memory triggers [46]. Parents value digital legacies, and are critical of the notion that content like family photos should decay or disappear over time [23].…”

“…Odom et al created a system called Photobox, which occasionally prints a randomly-selected photo from a Flickr user's own collection [44] to trigger memories over time. Cosley et al created a system called Pensieve, which supports reminiscence by triggering memories via digital traces [13,46].…”

Reorganize Your Blogs: Supporting Blog Re-visitation with Natural Language Processing and Visualization

“…Technologies for gathering and managing digital personal items, referred to as life-logging systems, are recommended for reminiscence and reflection [2,9,30,31]. With increasingly more personal content collected by technologies [9], another realm of research sought to understand people's interaction with digital past [1,[32][33][34][35]. Fleck et al identified re-visitation as a fundamental reflection activity that depends on the higher levels of reflection that require an explaining, connecting, and transforming experience [3].…”

“…They put forth the research challenge to explore connections within and between these areas, which inspired our direction of study. Areas of focus in this research lie in identifying ways to trigger reminiscence, and to identify the connections and relationships between blogged items [3,32,34].…”

“…A promising way to address these issues with blog re-visitation is through natural language processing and visualization [4,35,38]. Studies suggest that aggregated personal content creates value in blog reading experiences [5,11,34,38]. Recent studies showed that visualization could raise re-living of personal events [4,31,39].…”