Microsoft's MyLifeBits: TOTAL DIGITAL CURATION

In the spirit of Microsoft trying to be absolutely everything to everyone, Jim Gemmell and Gordon Bell of the Microsoft Bay Area Research Center are in the process of developing an application that will archive literally every aspect of a person's life. The application is called "MyLifeBits." Well, it's not exactly an application yet, the project is still in the research phase. I heard about it while reading an article by Richard Cox of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh titled "Digital Curation and the Citizen Archivist." In the article, Cox discusses the role of the archivist in schooling the general public on strategies to preserve their digital artifacts, and he mentions the MyLifeBits project as a possible method to do just that.

The MyLifeBits project was inspired by Vannevar Bush's theoretical computer system - the Memex. In 1945, Bush developed a plan for a machine which would combine the functions of storage and electronic capture of images. This "Memex" (the word is a combination of "memory" and "index") would store a library of information on microfilm and all of the images would be connected by "associative links." The Memex has been credited as a pre-cursor to everything from the development of hypertext to the search engine, but in their paper "MyLifeBits: A Personal Database for Everything" Gemmell and Bell see themselves as fulfilling Bush's vision. They state that Bush "posited Memex as 'a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory."

Microsoft is taking the word "enlarged" seriously. Included in this application are the following tools (keep in mind that this is not an exhaustive list):

1. TV capture tool (to capture your TV watching)
   
2. SenseCam (to capture images IRL)
3. GPS import and Map display (to track your movements)
4. Radio capture
5. Telephone capture
6. IM capture
7. Browser tool (to track your web-browsing)
   
8. Legacy email client (you get the idea)
   
9. Voice annotation tool
10. Text annotation tool

Gemmell and Bell's argument for developing such an ambitious application with such wide-reaching curation tools is that since no one can predict when some item might be useful the "safest thing is to simply [sic] keep it all. Everything."

As I'm sure you can imagine, there are a whole host of issues in making such an enormous amount of information accessible, and so far it doesn't sound like Gemmell and Bell have developed a workable solution to these problems. They have been experimenting with hierarchical classification systems and have discovered (surprise!) that such systems quickly become unwieldy when dealing with large amounts of information. They haven't abandoned the idea of hierarchical folder systems, however, and are actually experimenting with "hierarchical classifications that will be developed by others to be downloaded by the user, and which contain extra information such as synonyms and descriptions to ease their use."

Classifications schemes are not the only thorny issue for the MyLifeBits team. Constructing useful metadata capture for video has also proved difficult. In developing a method to garner metadata for video they have suggested harvesting audio and converting it to searchable text so that, e.g., one could search for the name of a given person and jump to a segment of the video where the speaker mentions that person's name. Whether this would necessarily lead the searcher to a segment of the video with the person he/she is looking for is, well, who knows?

Clearly there are a number of issues that need to be ironed out before Microsoft can release this product, but Gemmell and Bell seem intent on doing so. Just this year, they released a book, Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything, to proselytize their vision of total personal digital curation. While this project currently seems a little premature, it may be that in 30 years applications like MyLifeBits could be commonplace. If this is the direction that personal digital curation is going, what are some of the issues presented by such an all-encompassing view of "curation?" Certainly there are going to be copyright issues, classification issues, privacy issues (not to mention dystopian issues! Who wants their life to turn into some monitored, post-apocalyptic version of a Tom Cruise movie?)