Social Archivist

At 240 pages, it’s almost a page for every day I’m covering of my son’s first year. I’ve mixed in photos, scanned images, comments from Facebook, Twitter and his baby book. It’s a gift for his two sets of grandparents for Christmas, as well as a copy for us, and one for him when he one day leaves home.

I’ve used Blurb and am a little nervous about the quality as I’m pretty fussy and look closely at photos. Using their free tool Booksmart was an excellent experience – no crashes, no lost work (and I’ve been working on it for a while!) and no really annoying bugs while working with it. If you don’t like one of their many layouts, you can edit theirs or create your own, which came in handy every so often.   Even though I’m used to using Adobe CS4 tools, I didn’t feel like I was using a limited tool just for beginners and wish for more features.

It’s the second book I’ve made with Blurb – the first a wedding album for my brother-in-law and his wife which turned out well.  My next book is our 2009 annual.  When the year is complete, I’ll do a final export of our Facebook and Twitter status updates and combine them with all our photos which I’m still culling down.  I want to tell a story with the photos and content so we can remember the little things in the future.  I’m using iPhoto to organise all our photos with a smart album which pulls in all photos taken from this year.  If I delete photos from the smart album, they’re not deleted overall from iPhoto (handy when we often take photos of things for our website Throng).

I’d love to find other blogs where people talk about their process for making photo books, visual diaries, year books.  Have you spotted any?

I was intrigued to read about a new “social legacy network” called MyHeartWill.com which enables you to create, share and store digital memories in a “safe, private and secure environment that will live on for generations to come”.

“By using the internet as a storage space for these memories, they can never be lost or damaged.”

No form of archiving is completely safe but I do wonder how permanent anything stored online or even something digital can be? Is it truly more permanent than in printed form? How do I know if this service will be around in 100 years? Will Facebook? Will Twitter? How many floppy disks or computers are out there with data that can’t (easily) be read?

My other main concern with these types of sites (and more are popping up all the time) is that it is yet another regular discipline that we need to add to our already busy lives.

“People have a genuine desire to capture their lives. Other on-line platforms already exist that serve part of this function, but they’re frenzied, they’re fast, extremely public and by nature, pretty superficial. Here is a conscience-driven, thoughtful, evocative web-based tool that takes social marketing to a much deeper level.”

Maybe. You can already set up your Facebook, Twitter, blogs to be completely private if you so wish. There’s plenty of people blogging at a deep level about their lives so I wonder what this new tool offers that, say, opening a free account on Wordpress.com doesn’t:

• MyHeartWill costs $199US for 10 years and 2GB of storage for text, photos, videos and audio
• Wordpress is free and gives you 3GB of storage for text, photos, videos and audio and it can be as private as you want it to be

Those behind the site says that Facebook, Twitter and blogs etc are lacking when it comes to sharing the stories and content that comprise a person’s life, that they’re too hurried. In some sense I agree – most of the updates we do in Twitter or Facebook are very quick but those writing personal blogs or writing long notes on Facebook about events in their lives would likely disagree. The problem is that we don’t write long accounts of the stories and memories that we want to because we just don’t have time, not because we don’t have the tools available to us.

The issue is how to permanently store the things we’re already writing, sharing, talking about – and of course with the option of appending other content with it. Maybe the deeper stories will sometimes need to be added to fill in the gaps, but the day-to-day observations and comments really give you a thorough insight into someone’s life.

While writing this, I think of the blog Kyah’s Journey – one which documented the life of a beautiful little girl’s brave fight with cancer. The in-depth, personal and deeply moving blog is currently being converted into a book.

A truly ground-breaking tool is not another site to store our content but one which meaningfully combines our already-existing digital trails for future generations to enjoy.

I came across a series of articles about how people lined up for a souvenir copy of a newspaper when Obama became president. Here’s some interesting quotes from them:

“How do you memorialize an exuberant comments thread on a blog post or a series of ecstatic Facebook status updates when those pages could move or disappear? …how do you make something permanent in a medium built on constant change? For me, the only answer to come to mind is “print out and frame a screen capture.” What about you? How do you extract a memento from the online world? Rob Pegoraro

“You can’t put a computer screen into a scrapbook” Joyce Mutcherson-Ridley

“You can’t show your children your BlackBerry or your computer screen. In 30 years, my children will be able to touch and feel these papers when I tell them all about this historic day.” Merwyn Scott

Lots of people out there are pondering this issue of taking digital memories and preserving them in a physical form.

A document of my process for putting together a physical yearbook for my family for 2009:

Firstly an audit of some of what we have got to organize:

• 1272 iphoto photos + 86 cellphone photos
• 381 Facebook status updates Rachel (we automatically bring in our Tweets but I have deleted some Tweets from my Facebook timeline – not sure if I will add these back in using an export from Twitter and I add quite a few directly into Facebook)
• 531 Facebook status updates Regan
• 47 Facebook status updates Eli
• 4 blog posts on Eli’s (private) baby blog
• 38 blog posts on cre8d and ?? blog posts on Throng – not sure how many (if any) of these belong in a family yearbook?

Other possible elements:

• Favourite memories/moments
• Favourite websites
• Favourite songs
• Numerous videos – stills could be taken from these?
• TripIt itineries
• Movies watched at the cinema (only 2 given that we have a baby!)
• TV series we watched
• Amazon purchases
• 2 Google calendars
• 2 Remember the Milk accounts

Is there anything else I should think to include in a physical yearbook form?

The Telegraph has written a fascinating article entitled 50 things that are being killed by the internet with much food for thought.

Three from their list particularly relate to the topic of this blog:

12) Letter writing/pen pals
Email is quicker, cheaper and more convenient; receiving a handwritten letter from a friend has become a rare, even nostalgic, pleasure. As a result, formal valedictions like “Yours faithfully” are being replaced by “Best” and “Thanks”.

13) Memory
When almost any fact, no matter how obscure, can be dug up within seconds through Google and Wikipedia, there is less value attached to the “mere” storage and retrieval of knowledge. What becomes important is how you use it – the internet age rewards creativity.

15) Photo albums and slide shows
Facebook, Flickr and printing sites like Snapfish are how we share our photos. Earlier this year Kodak announced that it was discontinuing its Kodachrome slide film because of lack of demand.

Good food for thought:

“Is the Age of immediacy diminishing the value of history? Has our quest for the new replaced our sense of life as a journey?”
- Carole Guevin