Social Archivist

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

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!

Created using Blurb, NEWYORK2IDAHO documents a father and son road trip in April 2009 using tweets from a Blackberry while on the trip to narrate the photos.

Anthony Robertson used Blurb to print a book of Tweets (protected account) called Advice for my son.

In the forward he writes (emphasis mine):

I have thought about this project for some time. I have often wondered what little tidbits of information I should give you. I started to slowly post these 140-character granules of wisdom to Twitter; Twitter acting as a kind of repository of ideas. After several months of accumulation, I started to come up with a plan where the granules would have a bit of longevity.

When I found out I had rheumatoid arthritis and upon turning forty, I knew I wanted some of the ideas I have communicated over the years to stick within your brain.

Print Your Twitter is a handy little tool for doing just that.

You can easily delete tweets you don’t want in your archive, filter by keyword and optionally also include your friends’ tweets. The bit I liked the most is that it automatically pulled in my twitpics into the page:

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’re looking for a really quick way to print off all your Tweets without having any control over the design or format, try Tweetbook.

It only takes a few minutes before your own PDF file is ready for printing.

Here’s how a page in mine looked:

This looks promising: Twiary is a soon-to-be-launched service that will use your Twitter-account to “create something really beautiful”.

In March 2009, James Bridle compiled all two years of his tweets into a 270 page hardback book. James thinks he was the first to do it. It looks just like a novel:

The process was quite involved and time consuming. He wrote his own script to pull down all his tweets (although there are plenty of options out there now) and then pulled them into InDesign using another script before printing it with Lulu.

“When Twitter is inevitably replaced by something else, I don’t want to lose all those incidentals, the casual asides, the remarks and responses. That’s all really. This seems like a nice way to do it, and I’ll probably do it again in a couple of years time.” – James

In the comments section of his blog post, Benedict Leigh says:

“The loss of ephemeral daily information about life passing, not for me (or even my children) but for grandchildren is one of the things that worry me about the way I use sites like this.”