Social Archivist

A couple of articles have caught my eye this week: If you have lofty ambitions for your legacy, head for the attic and Cyberspace once you’re dead.

Some quotes from the articles:

“Did we ever give a thought to how much of this will endure beyond our lifetimes?” Probably not. What that means is that we are – carelessly or unwittingly – consigning the records of our lives to the digital shredder…. chances are that when historians come to write the history of our times, they will find a yawning gap in the record.

“Increasingly we’re not leaving a record of life by culling and stowing away physical journals or shoeboxes of letters and photographs for heirs or the future. Instead, we are, collectively, busy producing fresh masses of life-affirming digital stuff… We pile up digital possessions and expressions, and we tend to leave them piled up, like virtual hoarders… what do they add up to when we’re gone? The legacy of a life you hope your survivors will remember? Or a jumble of “digital litter” for them to sort through?”

As I’m working on our 2009 personal yearbook, I’ve been pondering how to display status updates alongside our photos – keeping it as interesting and readable as possible.

Here’s my current draft:  create a new blank page for year month and then just have the numbers signifying the day of the month.  Below each, show all the status updates on that day.  I’m skipping the time information – most of the time this isn’t too important.  If there were times which were particularly important, I could move those in. I’m using a different color for my husband’s updates, and I’ll use a different one again for my son’s.  A few updates I’m leaving off (links to websites usually) and I’m fixing minor typos as well!

While I had no trouble using Blurb for my son’s photo book, it is a little time consuming pulling in all the status updates and formatting them like this manually.  It’d be fantastic if I could set up a style like this, and they all get sucked in magically.

There’s so much emphasis on making sure you back up your files otherwise things could be lost forever. This is just part of the solution. Another important aspect is organizing the copies (disks, tapes, CDs, DVDs) into some sort of system which can be easily found later on (easier said than done).

Often overlooked, however, is the meta-data (context) for the files.

Much like the tin full of photos with an occasional penciled name or date on the back, will our digital backups be confusing puzzles without the proper context for people in the future?

I was thinking about this while working on a book of my son’s first year: I must put in names of people and places for his future reference!

Why not try taking a friend’s tweets/Facebook status updates for the year and using a tool like Wordle to create a personalized greeting card for them?

Inspiration for the wording inside the card came from Imogen Heap’s new single First Train Home: “What matters to you, doesn’t matter, matter to me”.

If you would like to try out my application to export your old Facebook statuses, click here – once you’ve given the application the right permissions, a CSV file will be downloaded. It’s very much in beta, so please leave me feedback.

I am currently testing out a little Facebook application I’ve written to export and save all my old status updates (I’m surprised no-one else has done this?). I am only able to pull out ones since August last year – not all of them, even though they are stored in Facebook.

I recently saved all my old Facebook statuses in an incredibly painful way* – which made me realise how un-user-friendly it is to look back in time on Facebook. There’s no “browse by month” navigation like on many blogs. While there is a feed of your latest Facebook statuses, it only shows your last 10 statuses.

* I clicked on my profile page, then painfully kept clicking “Older posts” until I finally got back to when I joined Facebook in early 2007 and then saved this massive webpage to my computer (~10MB).

…what will we have to show for all our social media energies?  What will we have to show our children and their childen?

There is long term value in our tweets and status updates – maybe not all of them but shouldn’t we start thinking about how to archive these before they’re either gone (I believe Twitter just keeps your last 3,200 tweets) or forgotten.

I once regularly kept a week-at-a-glance diary much like this one.  I still have ones from high school stacked in my attic and there’s no way I’d throw them out.  What once formed most of the content of my diaries is now scattered in many places online but is best captured by my status updates in Twitter and Facebook.

I wondered how it would look to copy in my Tweets and Facebook statuses into a week-at-a-glance diary.

Thanks to it being August, I bought a very cheap one today and picked a random week to add entries for.

This is how one page looked:

There was something strangely really fulfilling about manually copying in my Facebook and Twitter updates onto paper.  In this rapid-paced world, it’s not often we take time to reflect on things gone past and re-enjoy little recent memories.  I left out a few tweets which were links or things which didn’t have long-term value to me – but the process of filtering these out too was not a chore.  I was surprised at how much I wanted to continue with copying them in.  My status updates really were an important record I cared about keeping – not just something I found value in as-it-happened.

I began thinking: why couldn’t this process be done automatically on a large scale?  Not everyone has the time nor energy to do this sort of conversion.

Here’s how it could work:

1. You enter your Twitter/Facebook/Google Calendar/… login information
2. You optionally upload a sample of your handwriting (my husband says he’d hate to see things in his handwriting and would prefer it typed)
3. You filter out the things you don’t want to keep a permanent record of (e.g. reply Tweets, Tweets with URLs)
4. The application figures out the appropriate type of diary for you depending on the number of status updates that you do (one page per day/week/month)
5. You get sent a printed diary for your past year in your own handwriting (or chosen font).

Would this be an amazing gift to give someone for Christmas – and get sent a few weeks later?

(And aside from your own diary, you could buy diaries for other people – like Miley Cyrus’ diary…)