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!

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 ;).