My year in texts – part 1

For the last 8 years, I’ve been archiving most of my text messages since I’m too lazy to keep a diary and this has proven to be a worthy substitute.* I do this by typing the texts over from my phone in an Excel document. I’m sure there are better ways, but this manual labour has one important benefit – I learn the texts almost by heart and it makes it easier for me to  remember the bigger and smaller events in my life.

This year I want to do some actual text data crunching. So for the whole of 2010 I’ve been meticulously typing out all of my received texts, the date it was sent, who sent it, and in which order the texts got to me each day, so I can order them cronologically. Now, there are flaws of course. I could have for instance used an official time-stamp structure (since the time texts are sent can be important contextual information). Maybe next year. Also, I haven’t categorised the people who sent them (e.g. friends, family, colleagues) or the nature of the texts themselves (e.g. informative, love, absolute bollocks). And the final flaw is that I do not archive the texts I send out. For a complete archive, this would of course be best, but it would be impractical to do this, and also like I mentioned before, I’m lazy.

Coming January, I want to make an overview of:

• The number of texts received in total, and the busiest months / days / weeks
• The number of texts received per person
• The average / median / mode of the length of the texts, also per person
• Then, I want to see if I can draw some conclusions about my personal relations based on all this data.

I’ve now archived all my received texts up to 7 December 2010: 1,228 in total. This is not a very large number compared to the slew of texts sent by teenagers of course, which in the U.S. averages to 3,339 a month according to a recent article on Mashable [1]. However, compared to European [2] stats I seem to be pretty much in the top scale, and also quite Irish.

Admittedly, these are stats of texts sent, not received. However, I have a subscription for 100 texts a month which I slightly exceed each time, so the amount I receive will most likely be similar to what I send.

Ok, the number crunching will start in the coming two weeks or so. Any things I need to add to the bullet points above, like text categories or topics? Let me know, and I’ll consider it .

[1] http://mashable.com/2010/10/14/nielsen-texting-stats/

[2] http://bit.ly/fyvvWN

* Also, it demonstrates my obsessive-compulsive data-hoarding archive-loving nature, but let’s not get into that.

Setting up our digital family archive – part 1

This weekend, I met up with some members of my family (my dad’s side) to do something we’ve been talking about for year: digitising and structuring our family archive. We started talking about how to set up this digital archive, and decided to at least create various databases with information:

- Pictures

- Documents (from the archive itself, such as passports, drivers licenses, etc)

- People (one entry per person, taken from the already existing database)

- External information (newspaper clippings, family recipes, etc)

- Locations (important places where family members lived or have moved to)

- Entities (such as the company my grandfather worked for, the family preserves factory)

We talked about how to organise all this information, how to link it to each other, and how to involve other people from the family collect stories and annotations on things that we don’t know. More research is needed, but it’s an exciting prospect to actually create a very specific community in order to ‘crowdsource’ information, and we hope to get more and more people involved from other branches of the family that we don’t know that well. Who knows what might turn up!

After determining this crude set-up and the various metadata fields needed per database entry we selected a first set of pictures and documents that we would scan first. We felt this first batch should contain at least those pictures and documents that mean a lot to many family members

My family is very active in preserving its history already. We have done extensive research on our family tree and there is even a wonderful publication that contains written accounts of our family history, in which the various interesting characters and stories are collected, together with pictures and documents. However, there are literally crates of pictures, drawings, written stories, love letters from my grandparents, and the booklets made for their funerals, just to give some examples.

And while going through these remnants of my family’s past I realised why it is so important to undertake such a time-consuming task. I found my father’s hand-written speech he gave at my grandfather’s funeral. There were pictures of my grandparents in their younger years. Drawings of me that revealed my love and obsession with biology from a very young age. Accounts of my grandfather’s friends who wrote stories about his character when he was slipping away in the darkness of dementia. Pictures of all the grandchildren growing up through the years. These were just some documents and pictures that already brought back a flood of memories and emotions.

It just goes to show how much you can learn about your background and history, but also about what connects us all as humans: people and events shape us in ways we tend to forget or that are just latently present in our conscience. The ‘evidence’ which is left behind can be a powerful trigger needed to reflect on just what brought you here, wherever that is.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories – Salman Rushdie (1990)

I recently finished reading Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie (1990). The book is about Haroun and his father, the famous storyteller Rashid Khalifa, who set out to save the ‘Sea of Stories’. I won’t spoil the plot, but one part of the book stuck in my head. Since it so beautifully captures what I feel is one of the most important essences of archives, namely, the wealth of stories that are waiting to be found, I’m going to post it in full.

“[Haroun] looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead, but alive.”

Go on and read it, it’s beautiful.

Link to the book Open Library

How to YouTube!

You guys! Help is on the way! THEVirtualFrank explains how to use YouTube:

0.20: “Today I’ll be showing you how to use YouTube, so you can watch my shows, or post your own.”
0.38: On signing up for a YouTube account: “It’s not rocket science, however, it can be difficult to fill in the verification box.”

I’m all set now!

My MA thesis – Barbarians versus Gatekeepers?

So, I’ve finally gotten around to posting my thesis “Barbarians versus gatekeepers? Tagging as a way of defining the emergent Living Archive paradigm”. The focus of  my thesis lies on archives that have audiovisual collections, since it was written at the final requirement needed to complete the Master Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image at the University of Amsterdam. However, I do think that the findings presented in the thesis also touch on the theory and practice of many other cultural heritage institutions. I’ve posted the summary below, and here you can find the link to a PDF version of the whole thesis. Many others know much more about the subjects covered, and have written more eloquently about tagging, and about the shifts in archive theory due to the rise of the Web 2.0 / online social media environment, but hey, I’m still pretty proud of it .

The interwebs

A few rules of thumb:

1. Videos from 1990-2000 about the internet will always be hilarious.

2. Videos from 1980-1990 about the possibility of having (something resembling) an internet will always have a certain cute factor.

3. Videos before 1980 about the possibility of having (something resembling) an internet will always be amazing.

To demonstrate these rules, I have started to make a YouTube playlist. It’s still a random list, but I will keep adding new videos and ordering according to the rules above. Examples of the rules:

1. Moms on the net

2. 1981 Electronic newspaper

3. Douglas Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos from 1968, talking about ARPA and networked information sharing.

Of course, computers and internet were foreseen at least as early as the 19th century. For instance, Charles Cutter wrote an article in 1883 in the Library Journal called ‘The Buffalo Public Library in 1983′ and said: “The desks had … a little key-board at each, connected by a wire. The reader had only to find the mark of his book in the catalog, touch a few lettered or numbered keys, and [the book] appeared after an astonishingly short interval.” (Source: this great video called The Web That Wasn’t, a Google Tech Talk by Alex Wright)

Or just look at this 1879 cartoon from Punch talking about Edison’s telephonoscope which depicts a family talking to their family far, far ways on a giant videophone device.

Anything missing? I know there is, just leave your suggestions in the comments or on my Twitter.

I heart this cat

mean sammy the cat

Originally uploaded by hawk person

All right, I used to have a cat blog, which I quit because after three years I said all about cats there was to say. However, when a cat pops up in my inbox from friends who know my love for cats who look like they want to destroy the world, I just melt.

This cat is just made of opposites. A heart around his neck, and a look that says: “I’ll kill you in your sleep”. Great shot by the lovely hawk person, whose Flickr stream is worth perusing if you love birds and / or great photography.

I love this

Welcome to the first instalment of ‘I love this’, which means I am too lazy to write a decent post, but still feel the need to share little things I love.

So, I totally love this tile I got as a present yesterday.

Men are like air to me, but I can’t live without air.

…is following you on Twitter

I am always intrigued by the people who follow me on Twitter. Why do they do it? Are they spam accounts, lonely housewives, people who just follow you because they want you to follow them, because of course status is EVERYTHING! More is More!

Making this observation does of course not mean I am not excited when someone cool follows me before I have followed them. And sometimes, when I get the e-mail message with the notification that someone is following it me, it sounds so silly. For instance, today I got the notification “Augmented Reality is now following you on Twitter!” Sounds very surreal indeed. But of course, I followed right back. Cool people, cool stuff.

MA Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image

I spent the last 1,5 years studying in the wonderful Master programme Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image at the University of Amsterdam. Almost done, just some final small touches to do on my thesis on the effects of crowdsourcing on archive theory. Tonight, I advised some prospective students about the programme, what it entails and what opportunities it gives you. It’s safe to say I had an amazing time and met the most wonderful people and cannot imagine work in ‘the field’ without a sound theoretical background. When I finish my thesis, I’ll post it here, now I just felt like gushing about how great the programme has been.

Also, since this blog has very fast turned into a very weird mix of thoughts on archiving and new media on the one hand and my daily goings-on on the other (not mutually exclusive of course), here’s a song I’ve been playing over and over again the last few days: Modern Drift by the Danish band Efterklang. I have had the great fortune to see them live twice, and it’s a shame and a beautiful thing at the same time that they are not more famous. A lot of love for these guys.