Recently I attended a session at Haifa University, where the MA students of the Faculty of Management presented their research theses. I love these opportunites to hear bright young folks share their ideas!
One presentation attracted my attention in particular:
Dina Fridman talked about “Contemporary Wedding Photography: New photography Practices and digital wedding album management” (see her abstract here).
The point is that today everyone has a camera in their phone, so the role of the traditional professional photographer is complemented by scores of amateurs who create a vast number of photos, then share them online. Dina wanted to research the implications for how people retain a visual record of their weddings, and – beyond just weddings – to
Examine practices that are related to archiving and management of personal photo albums and… ways in which we record and archive our personal memories.
This fascinating subject gave rise to the thoughts I share in this post.
The rising quantity of information
An obvious aspect of today’s connected, social world is the explosion in the quantity of information generated by, and accessible to, all of us on planet Earth. Usually we think of this in terms of everyone generating information, and especially photos; but in the Wedding context we have multiple people generating photos of the same event, enabling us to see it through numerous eyes in parallel. This, in stark contrast to the older method – having a single professional (or one of the attendees – in my wedding it was one of our aunts, I recall) snap all the photos.
You might argue that this is all good – more photos to choose from. However, having to sift through hundreds of amateur photos can be way too much of a good thing. And the issue becomes, how do you archive all this stuff for the long run – in a way that’s going to be meaningful to you and to your descendants?
Creating meaning out of chaos
In the old days, people would create a photo album, which would become a family heirloom passed down the generations. Of course, unless it was profusely annotated, the meaning of the photos and the identity of the people they depict would get lost after 2–3 generations; but then, at some point so would the physical album itself. That’s when the wedding, or whatever the album covered, would fade into oblivion. Until then, there was one compact repository of its memory.
Today, with thousands of photos available, we have a problem. You can share albums online with your current friends, but you can’t leave your descendants (nor your future self of some decades hence) such a mass of photos! What you need to do is to generate a meaningful subset of those images. You need to create an album worth leaving – and while a century ago there were few enough photos to make this a simple matter, today you need to extract the right subset from the flood of snapshots, some of them better and many of them worse. Did I say Information Overload?…
What’s more, you need to add captions – explanations – to those photos, to give them meaning. That’s what Tagging is about, except that tagging in a specific piece of software (or social medium) may not survive for long.
The problem of information survival
A major issue is this: we have numerous free tools available for the storage and tagging of photographs, but you can’t really count on them to survive! Software tools (whether local or in the cloud) can disappear without warning, often taking all your data with them. Even leaving one’s significant photos on major players like Facebook is an iffy proposition when you want to conserve them for generations. And keeping stuff on your hard disk, or backup media, is outright silly: can you read the files you have on those 5-1/4 inch floppies you kept from 25 years ago? And will anyone be able to read the files you save under today’s OS in 25 years?
Of course, you could make a point of transferring the files with each new generation of storage media and file standards; that’s what major libraries and national archives are doing – and budgeting millions to allow it.
There is, really, one medium that has sufficient long term survival: gelatin silver prints on paper, a.k.a. as hardcopy photos. Not your average inkjet printouts, mind you: real photo processing. My great grandparents’ studio photos are still perfectly visible… As for digital formats, some may outlive others, but you want to play it safe and maintain a paper version just in case.
Curation of memories for the future
Back to “Ways in which we record and archive our personal memories”: how can we overcome all the problems I mentioned above and leave a meaningful archive?
To my mind, the goal should be to create the equivalent of a fully annotated album – a kind of well-thought-out “Catalogue Raisonné” of the most significant photos (and possibly other documents) that represent the key events of our lives, and that future people – whether our friends, our descendants, or our future selves – will be able to derive interest and pleasure from.
What form should this Catalogue take? Clearly, not that of an endless scrolling Facebook “Album”. It will have to be created digitally, which adds to our ease of producing it and to the facility with which it can be distributed. We’re talking about a digital scrapbook, really; my preference would be to ultimately generate it as a PDF document, that being a particularly stable standard. Such a document could include photos, captions, document scans and explanatory texts, organized as a proper book. This could be sent to our friends and relations digitally, but a bound paper hardcopy should also be produced from it, and given to the most significant recipients, to increase its chances of survival.
Making such a document will be a serious undertaking, which might continue over the years as more events unfold in our lives. Its quality will only be as good as the effort and thought put into it, which will be significant. Just think about sifting through 300 wedding photos to identify the dozen best ones! There are tools available to help; I use Adobe Bridge for photo screening to good effect. I’m sure there are scrapbooking applications out there – but steer clear of too-proprietary output formats when checking these out. And above all, put your mind and heart into the task: such compilations are by their nature very personal.
Lessons for the knowledge workplace
Surprisingly, there are analogies from all this to the handling of Information in the modern workplace.
Here, too, we have a vast amount of digital information being produced by numerous people. Here, too, much of the information is unimportant, but it hides nuggets of very valuable knowledge that has to be extracted from the flood. And here, too, there is a need to leave the essential knowledge in trust for future generations of employees – this is crucial for a company’s success, and comes under the heading of Knowledge Management.
The issues of information survival in an organization have less to do with media survival and more with KM systems: in most organizations wheels get reinvented all the time because of the lack of accessible knowledge of past work. Even as companies struggle to retain knowledge, they may not pay as much attention to putting it into summary form that future employees can understand the meaning of. Data may be kept, metadata much less often.
Curating a narrative of a company’s knowledge for the future is an important, often overlooked task. Keeping the knowledge around is hard enough, but giving it a sensible, searchable structure is something else again. I remember a senior manager whose idea of starting a library in a new plant was “let’s hire a couple of temps and have them photocopy everything important for archiving”. Brrrr!…
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Image courtesy Andrew King, shared on flickr under CC license.
