Pensieve: technologies supporting social reminscence
Try Pensieve yourself!
-
The Pensieve website can
deliver reminders to help you reminisce via email. It can send content
you (or friends) have created on Picasa, last.fm, flickr, Blogger,
or Twitter, as well as a set of interesting non-personalized prompts.
-
The Facebook app will
help you remember to look into your past in Facebook, both through
photos and status messages.
What it is
This project has an intense, personal inspiration: I rarely remember
the past, and mostly I remember bad things. And, although I've kept a
blog for 11 years specifically to remind me of the past, I rarely look
at it. Then I realized I can write programs to remind me to look at
it. Now I get text messages from my past and I like it. Pensieve is
about generalizing this to other people, other media, and other
contexts; adding support for social reminiscing, which my interviews
with potential participants has convinced me is really important;
and being very smart about what to choose to help you remember.
It's exciting! -- work is in progress and we have two prototypes.
I am definitely looking for more students, both
undergraduate and graduate, to help out. There are boatloads of
directions:
- Better understanding of people's current practices, both around reminiscing and around creating digital content related to memories
- Development and maintenance of the Pensieve community web site
- Building tools that use popular sites' APIs (flickr, Facebook, etc.) to make their content available to Pensieve users
- Creating algorithms that make smart decisions about which content to send
when, and to whom. Context isn't just physical location, mobile phones, and
finding a tasty place to eat: it will matter more in all systems. Get ahead
of the curve.
- Supporting social reminiscence, which was cited as hugely important in
our initial interviews.
If you want to help build tools and study an
important topic that's likely to be personally relevant and
have the potential to impact millions of people's lives if done
well, send me an email.
People
- Brian Alson (ugrad; back-end of Pensieve website, media connectors)
- Jon Baxter (ugrad; front-end of Pensieve website, media connectors)
- Mark Broomfield (ugrad; quantitative data analysis, admin tools)
- Cloud Chen (MEng; Facebook app)
- Eric Frackleton (MEng; Facebook app)
- Soyoung Lee (ugrad; design, qualitative data analysis)
- Chethan Sarabu (ugrad; design)
- Jenn Vargas (ugrad; Pensieve media connectors)
Join the team!
Publications and grants
- There is a paper about the preliminary interviews and prototypes submitted to HCI 2009
- We're working on a sweet CHI paper that will look in-depth at how people have used Pensieve so far.
- I'm putting together a workshop on memory and technology for CSCW 2010, funded in part by Cornell's Institute for Social Sciences
- This work is supported by my CAREER grant "Leveraging Online Behavior to Support Knowledge and Memory" and associated REU supplement requests.
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