Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [55]
Suppose someone were to release even a quarter of their lifelog posthumously: It would still confront the historians with a corpus vastly larger than they have ever experienced before. As more people lifelog, historians will also have to delve into the e-memories of other related figures as part of their study.
Earlier, I pointed out that it was a fallacy to worry about having enough time to watch your whole life. An individual would never want to watch his whole life, and knows what he may want to look for in his e-memories. But for the historian it truly is a challenge, because a historian doesn’t know what to search for or what can safely be ignored, having not lived the life in question. Thus, historians will become more and more adept at using data mining and pattern recognition, and will come to demand the latest in tools for comparing videos, performing handwriting recognition, converting speech to text, classifying background noise, and much more. They will rely on computing power to help summarize, classify, and identify anomalies, so that they can safely pass over their subject’s typical commute to work but not miss the one where she made an unusual stop. Many hours of the subject’s life may be classified as “reading,” during which time the title of what she reads should usually suffice.
However good automatic analysis may ever be, the most potent historical figures will be, as they are now, studied by many historians. Some will specialize in different periods or different aspects of the figure’s life. The subject’s e-memories, like the scientific data discussed above, will be in a common repository and the historians’ notes and links will be available to one another. Thus, they will not rely just on machine intelligence, but will look to other humans to point out events of significance, to classify material, and to identify trends.
This marked-up repository will also form a new way of delivering history to casual consumers. While only a few experts or motivated amateurs will want to delve into the full data set behind a scientific paper, the appeal of history—of historical stories—is very broad. Many people would be interested in seeing a little more context behind some point of interest, perhaps watching an entire baseball game that includes their favorite major league player as a twelve-year-old, or observing how a politician acted in a press conference early in his career, or listening to the recording of a famous concert mentioned in a musician’s biography.
I believe the electronic history exhibits will become more and more faithful to Bush’s trails. History presentations will stitch together media into a narrative, truly creating a trail from one artifact to the next, with attached comments. For instance, imagine you are following a trail that I created about the history of computer design. You might start with a chart showing the evolution of computers in the twentieth century, and hearing my voice explain them. Next in the trail is a page describing a computer architecture called SNAP, and you hear me explain Jim Gray’s contribution.
But here you grow curious—who was Jim Gray? How did Gordon Bell become involved with him? You see that this page is part of another trail, authored by a fellow named Tom Barclay, called “The Life of Jim Gray,” and divert into that trail to learn more about him. Presentations such as these bring Bush’s trails together with the World Wide Web to form trail webs, and ultimately a World Wide Web of trails.
Trail webs will have such advantages that traditional museums and science centers will have a hard time competing—what they will do is follow the trend already begun of complementing the museum with computer kiosks, handheld units, and other devices so that the real-space experience