Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [106]
We only touched on a little of what Steve Mann has done in wearable computers and mediated reality. His work runs the gamut from technical issues to legal issues to art.
Mann, S. “ ‘ Sousveillance’: Inverse Surveillance in Multimedia Imaging.” Proceedings of ACM Multimedia 2004, New York, October 2004, 620-27.
Mann, Steve. 2001. Intelligent Image Processing. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Mann, Steve, Anurag Sehgal, and James Fung. “Continuous Lifelong Capture of Personal Experience Using Eyetap.” Proceedings of The First ACM Workshop on Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences (CARPE ’04), New York, October 15, 2004, 1-21.
Mann, Steve, with Hal Niedzviecki. 2001. Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer. New York: Random House Doubleday.
Mann’s “EyeTap” glass can record what he sees—now Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence plans to turn his prosthetic eye into a video camera.
“Anti-Surveillance Filmmaker Plans Eye-Socket Camera.” Reuters, March 5, 2009.
http://www.eyeborgblog.com
Hasan M. Elahi is an artist exploring the bounds of surveillance and sousveillance by being a more extreme and consistent life blogger. He captures nearly everything that happens in his waking life in photos with time and location. Hasan’s tracking site provides an image of exactly where Hasan is at any time.
Hasan Elahi’s Web site. http://elahi.org
Hasan’s tracking site. http://www.trackingtransience.net
9. GETTING STARTED
Aimee Baldridge has written a complete and excellent how-to for digitizing everything in your life. She describes how you go about estimating, planning, and digitizing your collection of documents, photos, cassettes, videotapes, vinyl records, et cetera. This two-hundred-page book makes it clear just how daunting digitizing your entire past can be. Our recommendation is to start now by accumulating everything that is born digital and go back in time based on need.
Baldridge, Aimee. 2009. Organize Your Digital Life: How to Store Your Photographs, Music, Videos, and Personal Documents in a Digital World. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic.
The end of paper is nowhere in sight. Copiers and computer printers continue to accelerate the growth in the use of paper and printing. The first step of going paperless is not storing or transmitting paper—the convenience of paper as a write-once, high quality, portable display will continue until display technology advances quite a bit more.
Paper digitizers, aka scanners, are used to eliminate paper storage and transmission. An ideal scanner would be small, fast, and low cost; it would be able to handle stacks of one- or two-sided items in arbitrary formats and sizes from business cards and photos to books and blueprints, and to scan black-and-white as well as color at arbitrary resolutions, would have a shredder as its last stage, and would be as easy to use as the shredder. In 2010 it takes a half-dozen scanners plus a shredder to realize the ideal. Office copiers with scanning capability are increasingly approaching the ideal because they are fast and require the high resolution for printing that is inherent with an office copier.
The following scanners are in order of my own personal preference:
• Small units that fit nicely at the back of a desk. Usually this will be a feed-through format to save space. The Fujitsu ScanSnap models are very nice, handling both sides of the paper in a single pass, both color and black-and-white, at five to fifteen pages per minute.
• Digital cameras suffice as scanner alternatives. A high-resolution digital camera can digitize almost anything. An A-size 8½” x 11” page can be resolved at 150 dpi with 2 megapixels or 300 dpi with 8 megapixels. A copy stand or tripod and proper lighting are essential.
• All-in-one personal print-scan-copy-fax. A single device scans and prints documents and photos. Quality, reliability, and speed are often unimpressive.
• Personal flatbed with document feeder. These are typically inexpensive, large,