Last year we Fuji talked about a host of new tools one can use to take fieldnotes, but after listening to a recent podcast of On The Media, I think there are some new technologies on the horizon which are going to take fieldnotes to a whole new level.
Gordon Bell is a computer scientist with an eye for detail – every detail, in fact, that he’s accumulated over the course of his life. A senior researcher for Microsoft, Bell is at the vanguard of a movement called “lifelogging,” digitally storing every letter and photo, every phone call, email and video, every conversation, keystroke and scrap of paper, the entire minutiae of his daily routine, onto a hard drive.
He wears a camera around his neck called a SenseCam that takes snapshots every minute, of whatever may be in his path, including you, if you happen to be standing there.
What’s cool is that Bell and his team have created and deployed new tools, such as FacetMaps, to data mine the archive he’s created. You can see video demos here. Its Microsoft, so the GUI sucks, but the potential is there. [It is no longer run by Microsoft.] Of course, there are ethical implications that still have to be worked out. How do you opt-out of someone’s lifelog?
UPDATE: Minor changes for clarity.
UPDATE: 3/28/2014: MyLifeBits has a new home.
my student lina dib is doing her dissertation on this stuff… perhaps i can get her to comment..
Hi Kerim, Chris, Rex, and others
Yes, I think lifelogging tools bring many questions to the fore when it comes to fieldwork and anthropology in general. What’s been really interesting, when looking at these tools (recording devices and information management software) and working with their developers, is that the types of problems encountered echo with those that anthropology has been grappling with for many years, ie: the problem of representation, the minutia of everyday life, the archive fever made easier with digitization, and ethical issues about surveillance, to name but a few.
Microsoft for instance has been trying to deal with the obvious question of what to do with all this information. Their research lab in Cambridge, along with other labs in the UK are examining whether these digital recording and storing tools can be used as prosthetic memory devices (some labs are building annotated sound recorders, others are imagining recording and talking furry robot companions, and as Kerim points out, MSR is working on the SenseCam and Mylifebits). Some researchers have teamed up with neuropsychologists and are testing whether the SenseCam can help an amnesiac better recall her forgotten recent past. These practices draw my attention to the contemporary materialization of memory and serve to highlight how different understandings of the very concept of memory affect the design of recording devices.
But back to the question of fieldwork tools… I’ve imagined the SenseCam to be something worth experimenting with: What would an informant’s day ‘look like’ through thousands of sensecam pictures? As anthropologists, how would our note taking practices be altered/hindered/enhanced through the use of one of these devices? What kind of information management software (we can talk about an information system) is needed to help us sift through the data?
In a few months I will have the chance to play with some of these tools as I work with the developers and their test users. I’m looking forward to observing my own recording practices while doing more fieldwork and imagine that I will have the similar problem (not uncommon among any phd student) of dealing with too much information and struggling with how to ‘sort things out.’
Lately I’ve enjoyed thinking about other related but perhaps more poetic sides to these devices. Some developers (in collaboration with the BBC) are now looking at creative uses of the sensecam. They’re interested in the notion of narrative and in seeing how the familiar might be rendered strange and artistic from behind its fisheye lens…
Indeed lifelogging technologies bring up a plethora of interesting questions for the social sciences and for the arts (a challenging dichotomy to start with ;).
@Lina: Sounds great, look forward to hearing more about your work as it develops!
Right. This is endless reentextualization of our lives is what anthropologists do (as well as everyone else). Techniques to ‘capture’ new data about one’s self (or others) provide new fora for the production and remixing of these phenomena. Lina — you’re doubtless familiar with the Foucaultian take on this, but if you want to go back to the Renaissance origins of this particular profusion of techniques of the self I’d recommend James Aho’s lovely little volume on accounting and confession, which includes a nice discussion of an Italian merchant who obsessively recorded every action of every member of his household in his diary:
http://www.amazon.com/Confession-Bookkeeping-Religious-Rhetorical-Accounting/dp/0791465462/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200949403&sr=8-1
p.s. deposit your stuff on blogging with Mana’o!
This whole train of thought really evokes the obsessive self-recording and analysis of Ethan Hawke’s character in Michael Almereyda’s _Hamlet_ (2000). Anyone seen it?
If we’re considering fiction, then, I recommend Charles Stross’s sci fi epic _Accelerando_ that imagines technologies of extra-cerebral memory taken to their absurd extremes. In an Open Access aside, the novel can actually be downloaded in its entirety at http://www.accelerando.org/