• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

vi) Tax for all years

vii) Wills, trusts, and family legal

viii) Family member(s) financial

i. GB personal and family members

i) X’s (for all X family members), including: Certificates (birth, . . . passport, et cetera)

ii) Health X (for all X family members)

iii) Society memberships

iv) Vitae

2. My Documents-Archive holding archival content

a. A Big Shoebox for most personal photos and video snippets

i) Family by year and albums

ii) Person(s) x

iii) Places

iv) Trips

v) SenseCam (o(1000) sequences of birthdays, celebrations, conferences, show, walks, et cetera)

vi) Things

vii) Food dishes, restaurants, et cetera

viii) Ephemera, memorabilia

ix) Animals

x) Underwater photos

b. Profession-specific photos for artifacts, computers, robots, people

c. My bio including articles, events, interviews, patents

d. My publications papers and reports

e. My talks and presentations

f. Other publications papers and reports

g. People, references, recommendations, vitae

h. Archived company and organizational folders (X)

i) Digital Equipment Corp. . . .

ii) NSF

i. Archived calendars and correspondence (t)

j. Archived files (e.g., DEC WPS, e-mail)

3. My Books books authored, books scanned

4. My Voice Conversations and Notes (telephone conversations are held in MyLifeBits database)

5. My Media, i.e., song collections from ripped CDs

6. My Videos including c. 1950s 8mm movies and lectures

Psychologists have identified “lifetime periods” as an important way that autobiographical memories work. Lifetime periods are thematic and include work or jobs, educational institutions, and relationships that exist over an extended period of time. These lifetime periods are an important part of my hierarchy, above.

Conway, M. A. 2005. “Memory and the Self.” Journal of Memory and Language 53:594-628.

Conway, M. A., and C. W. Pleydell-Pearce. 2000. “The Construction of Autobiographical Memories in the Self-Memory System.” Psychological Review 107, no. 2:261-68.

McNeely, I. F., and L. Wolverton. 2008. Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

Hierarchies can be useful, but are sometimes too constricting. Many times you want to just access items by some attribute. For instance, you can probably access your e-mail by the attributes of date, subject, and sender, without designating that each of them occupies a particular level of a hierarchy. You can also see this when you shop at, say, Amazon, where you can sift cameras by brand and number of pixels. In the world of librarians, using attributes to organize things is called “faceted classification.” The Flamenco Search Interface project from the UC Berkeley School of Information has some good demos on faceted organization.

Flamenco Web page. http://flamenco.berkeley.edu

Hearst, Marti A. “UIs for Faceted Navigation: Recent Advances and Remaining Open Problems, in the Workshop on Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval,” HCIR 2008, Redmond, Washington, October 2008.

For those of you interested in trying a start-up:

Bell, C. Gordon, and John E. McNamara. 1991. High-Tech Ventures: The Guide for Entrepreneurial Success. New York: Perseus Book Publishing.

Nesheim, John L. 2000. High Tech Start Up, Revised and Updated: The Complete Handbook For Creating Successful New High Tech Companies. New York: The Free Press.

10. THE FUTURE

Nathan Myhrvold said, “On the hardware side, I’m pretty confident there’ll be another twenty years at least, which is another factor of a million. A factor of a million reduces a year into thirty seconds. Twenty years from now, a computer will do in thirty seconds what one of today’s computers would take a year to do. So, for particularly big computational problems there’s no point in starting. You should wait, and then do it all in thirty seconds twenty years from now! That is the hardware