Memories in a digital shoebox By Alan Cane Financial Times Published: March 15 2004 18:44 If your mem'ry serves you well, goes the line from the caustic Dylan song, This Wheel's on Fire . But few people's memories do serve them well, which is why humans are addicted to letters and photographs, mementoes and souvenirs, to help them recall important events in their lives. Increasingly, however, these aides-mémoire are going digital: good honest paper and ink are giving way to insubstantial e-mail and text messages. The advent of the digital camera means the satisfyingly jumbled shoebox full of family snaps is being superseded by images stored in a personal computer. Our traditional collections of physical memorabilia are being replaced wholesale by collections of binary digits and invisible patterns on the surfaces of computer discs. This is all contributing to a tidal wave of digital data that intimidates the non-technical and technical alike. I write from experience: last week, wanting to print some copies of a favourite photograph taken with my now rather aged digital camera, I spent an evening hunting through mountains of files identified only by numbers. Even if I had labeled the shot properly, I would have forgotten the name of the album where it was stored. Finding ways to help people organise and navigate their way through their digital memories has been testing the mettle of researchers from some of the world's biggest technology companies over the past few years. Tomorrow, Nokia of Finland, the leading manufacturer of mobile phones, is expected to launch its contribution, a technology it calls Lifeblog which, it claims, will make it easy for users to store, view, browse and share digital memorabilia. It is essentially a way of digitising and transferring photos, videos and messages to a computer and cataloguing them for quick retrieval. As such, it is not a new idea. As early as 1945 - the same year Eniac, arguably the first true modern computer, was announced - Vannevar Bush, the US electronics pioneer, put forward the idea of a memex, a device in which an individual stores all his books, records and communications which is mechanised so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexi- bility . The technology to realise the memex was not available in Bush's day but his idea has its modern incarnation in Microsoft's MyLifeBits project, _base_d in the software company's Media Presence laboratory in San Francisco. One of its researchers, Gordon Bell, the distinguished computer scientist, is chief guinea pig, turning all his books, personal documents, photographs, posters, home films and compact disc collection into digital form for storage on a computer, annotated with de_script_ions to help make individual items easier to retrieve. The project has been augmented by the SenseCam, developed at Microsoft's research centre in Cambridge, England. This is a small digital camera worn round the neck that automatically takes up to 2,000 images every 12 hours, providing a visual diary of the wearer's activity. For example, every time he or she enters a room, or meets another person, the camera fires. It is one answer, Microsoft researchers suggest, to questions such as: Now where did I leave my spectacles? But MyLifeBits is still a research project. The Life- blog software will be available within a few weeks at a price of about ?30 (?20). Users will also have to buy a cell phone capable of running the program. It should bring to ordinary individuals capabilities that have been available to businesses for some years now as media asset management systems. Companies, especially those in the entertainment and advertising businesses, are becoming increasingly aware of the value of the content they produce: repurposing a photograph or film clip is hugely cheaper than starting out each time from scratch. Stored in digital form in big computer systems, these assets can be browsed and retrieved using _meta_data - de_script_ions of the content attached to the photograph, film clip, snatch of music or whatever, that can be searched by computer. These systems are fine for businesses, which can hire an individual painstakingly to label each and every asset with _meta_data and pay for the expensive search software. But they are wholly impractical for people who have neither the time nor the inclination even to bring order to their collections of conventional photographs. The search for a simple way to help people retrieve their memories has led to some novel, if bizarre, ideas. BT Exact, for example, the research arm of the UK telecommunications operator, last year proposed a scheme _base_d on physical _object_s - a champagne cork, a concert ticket stub or a menu. The _object_ is scanned to create a digital image that can be _link_ed electronically to images stored in a viewer. Placing, say, the cork on the scanner brings back the images - wedding photographs - for example, as a slide show. A seashell might recall images of a seaside holiday. But as Andy Gower, the BT Exact project leader, admits, expecting people to rattle around with a boxful of keepsakes is probably a bright idea too far. The Nokia development, however, is _base_d on something that virtually everybody carries with them: a cell phone. Some 2.5m phones with built-in digital cameras were sold in the UK last year, virtually the first year they were available. Soon it may be impossible to buy a handset without a camera. Colour screens are improving fast. The next generation of camera phones will take photographs with a resolution not much different from that of a 35mm compact camera. Some believe the camera phone will soon take over from the disposable camera. The camera phone, says Christian Lindholm, Nokia's director of multi- media applications, is becoming the life recorder . What the Lifeblog software does is to co-ordinate the transfer of photos, videos, e-mails and text and voice messages from the phone to a personal computer, automatically keeping track of their significance in the user's life. The Nokia trick is to arrange the material along a time line, a horizontal diary in which all the events of a particular day are stored under that unique date. Mr Lindholm, an economist turned ergonomist, argues that the time line makes it simpler to browse and search for individual items than with the conventional approach of storing items in folders or albums. You can 'Google' your life, he says, referring to the search engine that is revolutionising the way people find and retrieve information from the internet. While Nokia, as a handset maker, naturally emphasises the camera phone, memorabilia from any source, once digitised, can be stored using the Lifeblog software. However, the launch of Lifeblog has a significance far beyond that of yet another consumer electronics product. Users will be trusting the physical record of their past to a technology. What if the machines fail and lose your memories? What if the technology changes, leaving you unable to revisit your past? Mr Lindholm suggests that subsequent versions of Lifeblog will allow users to transfer their collections over the internet to a trusted repository , a memories farm equipped with future-proof technology from which items can be retrieved at will. Questions of security, resilience and cost remain. The shoebox may enjoy its pivotal role in the preservation of human memories for a few more years.
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