Thesis Proposal: Rebecca Gulotta

THESIS PROPOSAL

Digital Systems and the Material of Legacy: Supporting Meaningful Interactions with Multigenerational Data 

Rebecca Gulotta

 

Tuesday, June 9th, 2015

10:00am EST

NSH 3305

 

COMMITTEE

Jodi Forlizzi (co-chair), CMU HCII

Aisling Kelliher (co-chair), CMU School of Design

Laura Dabbish, CMU HCII

Dan Cosley, Cornell Information Science

 

DOCUMENT

 

ABSTRACT
People generate vast quantities of digital information as a product of their interactions with digital systems and with other people. As this information grows in scale and becomes increasingly distributed through different accounts, identities, and services, researchers have studied how best to develop tools to help people manage and derive meaning from it. Looking forward, these issues acquire new complexity when considered in the context of the information that is generated across one’s life or across generations. The long-term lens of a multigenerational timeframe elicits new questions about how future generations will manage and make sense of the information left behind by their ancestors.   

My prior work has examined how people perceive the role that systems will play in the long-term management and stewardship of digital information. This work demonstrates that while people certainly ascribe meaning to pieces of digital information and believe that there is value held within their largely uncurated digital materials, it is not clear how or if that digital information will be transmitted, interpreted, or maintained by future generations. Furthermore, this work illustrates that there is a tension between the use of digital systems as ways of archiving content and sharing aspects of one’s life and an uncertainty about the long term availability of the information shared through those services.

The work proposed here builds on this earlier to research to develop systems that will investigate how identity construction, the transmission of information across generations, the revisitation of digital records, the lifespan of digital materials, and the ways in which digital information reflects different aspects of one’s desired legacy influence the use and value of legacy-oriented systems. The findings from this work will be analyzed to create patterns and guidelines for the creation of systems that allow people to manage, curate, transmit, and reflect on large collections of digital materials. In so doing, this work contributes a better understanding of how digital systems, and the digital information people create over the course of their lives, intersect with the processes of death, dying, and remembrance.