Digital Legacy - Who Do You Trust?

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss views on trust around custodianship and curation of non-photographic digital legacies. Physical photographs have long been the artefact of choice for storytelling and leaving a legacy for those that come after. Digital photographs, on the other hand, present curation challenges in terms of the size and complexity of the user-generated libraries. Further, their highly personal nature can lead to concerns over possible embarrassing content, which makes custodianship difficult.

In a mixed method research project, five non-photographic digital asset types emerged as being significant in the daily lives of participants, namely music, books, programming, gaming and note-taking. We compared them to participants’ views of digital photographs as a legacy.

We found that journaling, music and books read were on par with photographs for emotional attachment and providing a sense of self, in some circumstances. Indeed, some non-photo assets, such as music playlists and reading lists were cited as being less context specific and more able to communicate sense of self than photographs.

Collections of non-photographic assets were typically much smaller than collections of photographs and were stored in more organised and centralised libraries, which makes curation easier. We also examined the intent to leave assets as legacy and the desire to curate them before leaving them.

Our research also revealed lack of defined custodianship for digital legacy data being left behind. Participants were pre-occupied with ultimate target audiences that might be interested in the legacy, as opposed to who would be trusted to look after and administer the legacy.

In future work, we plan to conduct a series of workshops on trust and custodianship to explore how a cohort of everyday users might navigate and show confidence in leaving a curated digital legacy.