The Digital Scrapbook

Watching our children grow is like nothing else - by turns fascinating, beautiful, alarming, tedious, poignant and points in between. All of life is there. As parents it is natural for us to want to capture it. A generation ago we had diaries, letters, scrapbooks, still photos, maybe Super 8, maybe cassettes, and our parents used them to document fairly manageable quantities of memories in them, limited by the cost of media, physical storage, ease or otherwise of use. Now, my wife and I are busily generating video clips by the dozen and photos by the hundred of our son, and pouring them into the series of black or grey holes that are local storage on a variety of devices, social networks, email and so on. Our improved access to technology also means that I can indulge my obsession with words to the full by keeping spreadsheets and generating infographics to track Ben's language acquisition. And I can make audio recordings of his night-time chatter straight on to the hard drive, where they will remain, gathering pixel dust, until I can somehow find the time to knock some sense and order into them.

Anyone familiar with the NHS "red book" will also know that it has several pages of developmental milestones that invite us, with an increasingly accusatory air, to record the time and place where our little ones first clutched, sat, crawled, stood or cruised. And you might, like us, have a baby album or two where you occasionally remember to stick a painting or a lock of hair, but more often don't.

As we increasingly rely on the digital and neglect the physical, we have an uneasy feeling that we haven't really figured out how to do our remembering digitally. We hope that we'll work it out one day. But in the meantime we are storing up at least two big problems for ourselves. First, we are accumulating mountains of material, unfiltered and usually undifferentiated by useful metadata, where the good stuff is becoming ever more invisible because it's obscured by all the average stuff around it. Will we ever have time to go back and sort out the mess?

Secondly, even if we do, we can only hope it will still be there. By now, everybody but the most organised and thorough among us has probably been through the experience - several times - of simply losing all their emails because of hardware or software changes, corrupted discs or what have you. Even if like me you have diligently exported archive files whenever you can, some software and formats simply change too radically and too quickly. What would once have been yellowing in a shoebox has vanished into data oblivion. (Indeed, for those of us of a certain age, there is a paper trail of precious memories that eerily dries up somewhere in the mid-nineties, so that a future archaeologist might imagine we had all been simultaneously struck by some weird virus that reduced our society to communicating with each other only through the medium of bills and junk mail.) The same thing has happened to our music collections. Why do we imagine things will be any different for photographs and videos?

We think there's an opportunity here to help people come to terms with the dilemmas of digital memory. The short video at the top of this post sets out the problem and a proposed solution in the context of a grant application to the Technology Strategy Board, who are currently running a competition seeking disruptive technology ideas. Our starting point is that people will not quickly change existing behaviours around the capture of content and data from their children's lives; but that through a series of nudges we might help inject some useful structure into the content and data being captured, whether that's stored in the cloud, locally or in a new service. Most importantly, we aim to provide a data spine - schemas and controlled vocabularies - to support this. On the one hand, we'll seek to provide tools for individual families to build and hand down their own stories. So that central data spine can be expressed through apps, online infographics and even personalised physical books.

On the other hand, if parents are willing to anonymise and pool their children's developmental data, there is an opportunity to build value for society as a whole, whether for application in healthcare, policymaking or social history. And by building in a way that's open to the wider semantic web, we aim to tap into wider network effects to improve the richness, value and connectedness of that data. In Clay Shirky's schema, this is about mining the cognitive surplus to build civic value. For me, it's more urgent - it's about trying to make sure my family remembers the challenges, the pain and the joy of growing up together.