Understanding personal digital collections

Abstract

Once undertaken primarily by museum professionals, the activity of curatorship has been popularized via the Web. Social media tools, such as YouTube playlists and Pinterest Web bulletin boards, enable users to curate a diverse range of materials for personal use and for broader publication. But what makes one set of "curated" items more interesting than another? In this paper, we show how findings from an initial humanistic inquiry led to a lab-based user experiment, and how combined insights from these studies have illuminated new research streams in both humanistic and design research modes.

Comparative appraisal of expressive artifacts

“…The comparative appraisal method developed for the motivating scenario was used in both [9] and in a subsequent experiment. It has proved successful as a key component of our data analysis, as it facilitates systematic comparison of the expressive artifacts created in our study while remaining sensitive to the complex, subtle nature of the qualities being investigated.…”

“…It has proved successful as a key component of our data analysis, as it facilitates systematic comparison of the expressive artifacts created in our study while remaining sensitive to the complex, subtle nature of the qualities being investigated. In [9], disagreement between the two assessors for each artifact was minimal, as far as the project goal of sorting into ranges was concerned, and demonstrated a large difference between participant and example collections, before and after the experimental intervention. With confidence in this assessment, we were then able to focus on isolating, via the close reading of both individual collections and participant interview comments, reasons for these differences.…”

“…This initial work proposed a set of three expressive qualities that personal collections might exhibit: an eclectic purpose, an authorial voice, and emotional intimacy. A subsequent study involved a lab experiment to see whether exposure to collections that embodied all three of these qualities would affect the process or product of collection design [9]. Working within an easy-to-use digital video library environment, participants created personal collections using a library of source material focused around a particular theme.…”

Placelessness, spacelessness, and formlessness

“…Older virtual possessions that have not been viewed in months could be automatically resurfaced in ways that invite people to encode them with improved organizational metadata, simply reflect on them, or even dispossess them if desired. In this way, metadata could be created that captures perceived value in use and, more broadly, to help move the agency and meaning making implicated in curatorial experience back to people [7]. As we look toward longerterm implications of multi-generational interactions with virtual archives [8], this offers one strategy that could implore people to re-evaluate the value of the virtual possessions in their archive in meaningful ways.…”

“…In the past several years, HCI and design researchers have begun to explore people's practices with their digital content and collections [e.g., 3,7,14,15,25,27]. This growing body of work has focused on both understanding and building tools to support people's values and practices surrounding specific types of virtual possessions (e.g., photos, video, music) and virtual archives as a whole.…”