So I, I feel like over the past day we've sort 0:02 of heard a lot about design and technology, and we have really 0:04 good speakers, and really wonderful people at this conference, but I wanna, 0:08 I wanna step back just a little bit, and talk about content. 0:13 And, I know this is a design in technology 0:18 conference, but I wanna talk about how content, especially 0:21 in the form of archives, how designers and technologists 0:25 can start to address the problems that I see. 0:29 And just to set this up, when I think of archives, I 0:33 think of when you come to a blog and you wanna find 0:35 all the old posts that people have made on that blog, you, 0:39 there's a couple of patterns that I think we've all fallen into. 0:43 There's the previous and next, and your 0:46 constantly paging back and you're, it takes a 0:48 really long time to go, go through the 0:51 entire set of arch, of archived blog posts. 0:53 If you look at either your Flickr favorites or 0:57 your chip Triple favorites, there's sort of like a 1:00 grid of, of images, and it's all reverse chron, 1:03 and it's also kind of hard to, to dig through. 1:05 And then there's stuff like, there's stuff like the Twitter archive, which looks like 1:10 Twitter, and there's, there's no real reward 1:15 I think for going, going through your tweets. 1:19 It's really you know, I think we need things 1:22 like data visualization to start making sense of this information. 1:25 And so I wanna start a little bit abstract and 1:29 sort of talk about why we need to be doing this. 1:33 And then I'll include some practical examples, sprinkled throughout 1:36 my talk just to ground this a little bit more. 1:40 Okay, so let's start. 1:43 [BLANK_AUDIO] 1:44 hi!, 1:46 I'm Allen. 1:47 And despite the title of this talk, I'm not a trained historian. 1:48 I'm not a trained archivist. 1:53 Like you, I make things for the web. 1:56 And these days I work at the New York Times, and the first 1:59 month I started working there, I went on a tour of the morgue. 2:03 This is the New York Times morgue, where there are clippings and 2:06 photographs of everything that the, the, that the Times has ever published. 2:09 And I found this. 2:15 This was a front page of the paper on 2:17 the morning of the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic. 2:21 [BLANK_AUDIO] 2:25 And, here's the rest of, the archives. 2:28 You know, you can see some photographs, and on the back there's some notes. 2:31 And there's some crossing outs, and there's a stamp on 2:37 the bottom that tells you when, when this photograph was published. 2:41 And this is what the morgue looks like. 2:46 Right? 2:50 This is what's in the file cabinets. 2:51 And they're all sorted by topic, and time. 2:52 And the man who takes care of this place, his name is, is Jeff Roth. 2:57 He told me that the morgue used to live in the same building as all the reporters. 3:01 It was very important for reporters doing their research. 3:07 If they were writing a piece about a politician running 3:10 for office, or someone famous just died, and they're, like, crap. 3:12 We don't need, we don't have an obituary ready. 3:17 We need to like, get everything we have ever written about that 3:19 person, and, and somehow pull it together into an article in 2 hours. 3:22 And the morgue would send them a file folder of 3:26 all the clippings and photographs that the Times had ever written. 3:29 And give it to them. 3:33 And when they're done with that article, they 3:34 would send the clips back to the morgue. 3:35 So this was a very important part of their research. 3:36 [BLANK_AUDIO] 3:39 Now, many newspapers and magazines, they, they kept 3:41 similar archives but most of them had been 3:44 dismantled and cleaned out and thrown out because 3:48 they take so much space and money to maintain. 3:51 This morgue is one of the few that still remain open today. 3:56 The morgue lives in a separate building now, down 4:01 the street from where I go to work every day. 4:04 [BLANK_AUDIO] 4:06 But to be honest, I, I don't know how much this morgue gets used today. 4:08 [BLANK_AUDIO] 4:11 So design for archives. 4:14 What do we think of when we say the word archives? 4:16 Do we think of something like the morgue, or do we think of 4:18 some deep under ground vault with dusty shelves and even 4:23 dustier manuscripts or maybe we even think of something like this? 4:27 Right? 4:33 The Egyptian pharaohs locked away in their tombs. 4:34 [BLANK_AUDIO] 4:36 All these places have been forgotten. 4:38 And they've been forgotten either because they fell out 4:42 of people's everyday lives, they no longer matter to 4:45 them, or because the people to which these things 4:47 did hold meaning for are dead and long gone. 4:51 Now the internet was designed to be redundant and resilient. 4:57 [BLANK_AUDIO] 5:01 Sure we still sometimes lose data, when geoshities when geocities shut 5:02 down or the recent .net magazine migration we lost all these articles. 5:08 That happens, but those are intentional losses, and, when 5:14 things happen to the unsinkable, that tends to make headlines. 5:19 And people pay enough attention to try and stop it. 5:23 [BLANK_AUDIO] 5:25 But what happens far more often to the pass is unintentional. 5:28 And so, it's much more difficult to guard against. 5:33 So, let me ask you this. 5:37 How many of you remember the last thing that you did on Instagram? 5:40 How many of you, without checking your phone, even 5:45 remember the last photo that you posted on Instagram? 5:48 When you go down your feed, it lets you teleport 5:52 instantly, right, to California, to Greece, to Vietnam, South Africa. 5:55 You're seeing 5 different countries all in a single moment in time. 6:01 And we, we're really good at this. 6:06 We're able to compress so much space into a single moment in time. 6:07 But we're not quite as good as doing the opposite, of showing one's, one moment in 6:12 time and seeing what, what you've done and 6:16 what you've done in the past, and you know. 6:18 To go farther and farther back. 6:21 [BLANK_AUDIO] 6:23 And so what happens far more often to the past is, we simply forget. 6:26 [BLANK_AUDIO] 6:32 It slips our mind so easily because for us, these are just things that happen. 6:34 Something that we did and, it doesn't hold any meaning for us yet. 6:40 Any weight. 6:43 [BLANK_AUDIO] 6:44 And so, when these things slip from not just our 6:47 short term memory, but our long term memory, this information 6:49 becomes effectively lost, even though it stays on the servers 6:53 of Instagram, or other web services, we can't access it. 6:55 We don't have access to this in our minds. 7:00 [BLANK_AUDIO] 7:02 And so in other words, I think the question when 7:04 you're designing for archives, is you're de, designing for amnesia. 7:07 [BLANK_AUDIO] 7:11 How do you design a time machine? 7:14 [BLANK_AUDIO] 7:16 Now, how does short term memory work right now on the web? 7:20 Usually when you go to a users 7:25 profile page there's a section called Recent Activity. 7:27 And there are all these little discreet items of 7:31 updates that you've all these actions that you've been doing. 7:34 But, I don't think anyone ever really pays much attention to it. 7:39 I, I know I don't, but I don't find that very surprising 7:42 it would be a little bit like if we were you know, 7:46 having a conversation and you asked me what I did yesterday and 7:50 I said something like, well, first at 8 o'clock, I woke up. 7:53 And then at 8:15, I brushed my teeth and then took a shower. 7:59 And then at 8:30, I went and walked the dog. 8:05 And then at 8:45 I threw a dog, or I threw 8:07 a stick at the do, at the dog and it ran away. 8:11 [BLANK_AUDIO] 8:15 I mean, after that conversation, I would not blame you if 8:19 you never again ask me how my day was, [LAUGH] right? 8:22 That is a terrible way to have a conversation. 8:24 But the reason why these activity update are so short on the web, is 8:28 that we've gotten really really good at 8:31 itemizing the posting and creation of content. 8:34 [BLANK_AUDIO] 8:37 Less often now do you think of putting up, up 8:40 a whole blog post, right, you're more often you're composing 8:42 a single Tweet, you're taking a single photo and posting 8:45 that on Instagram, you're leaving a single comment on Facebook, 8:50 [BLANK_AUDIO] 8:54 But, the units of creation 8:57 [BLANK_AUDIO] 8:59 can be separate from the units of reflection, right? 9:02 Right now we think of them as the same thing but they can be separate. 9:05 When, when we were still composing entire blog 9:10 posts, we, we didn't have to make this distinction 9:13 because if you were writing about, let's say, 9:16 a trip to Argentina, it was one cohesive update. 9:19 But if you were to do the same thing now, there, you know, maybe you posted about 9:25 your flight on Twitter and you took some pictures of some sunsets on Instagram. 9:31 And then maybe on Facebook there's this conversation between you 9:35 and your friends about what to eat or where to go. 9:39 So, if you were to come back to your trip a year later, you have 9:42 to forage, forage around a little bit 9:46 before the complete picture forms in your mind. 9:49 [BLANK_AUDIO] 9:52 Now, this atomization of creation is another topic for another day. 9:54 And, but I think it's mostly a good thing. 9:58 It's fine. 10:03 But, it just means that we now have to start thinking 10:04 very deeply about what the units of meeting are to a person. 10:08 See these two dinner plates? 10:15 This one, on the left, is the typical plate size in the 10:18 US and the plate on the right is the typical size in Europe. 10:22 [BLANK_AUDIO] 10:25 And in a study where they gave Americans, 10:29 I'm sure it would've been the same, you know, 10:32 for Europeans, but if they served, if they 10:34 served food to an American on a smaller plate, 10:38 those people said they were just as satisfied with how full they were. 10:43 Even though they ate less. 10:49 [BLANK_AUDIO] 10:50 Now there are a course a lot of cultural and psychological reasons for this right. 10:53 Most people eat whatever's on their first 10:58 plate before they start thinking about seconds. 11:00 There's cultural politeness about eating everything that you're served, but I think 11:02 the key fact remains here that these plate sizes, these plates 11:07 act as handles for how you manipulate and control how much you consume. 11:12 And the typical activity feed is a little bit like not having a plate. 11:18 [BLANK_AUDIO] 11:24 You have no sense of how much you're supposed to eat. 11:26 Everything is in these tiny pea sized morsels and they all 11:29 look the same and each one isn't very satisfying on its own. 11:33 So, either you're left hungry because you just said, 11:37 fuck it, I'm not gonna do this, or you 11:42 eat and eat and eat too much, and you're 11:46 bloated and you're self dis, you're, you're disgusted with yourself. 11:49 [BLANK_AUDIO] 11:52 But okay, some things online do have handles. 11:55 Facebook timelines separate out all this activity into years. 11:59 Into discrete years. 12:06 And this is great, right? 12:06 There's only a couple of items for you to filter and navigate by. 12:09 And more than that, it lets you wrap your arms around this information. 12:12 You get a sense of the whole. 12:17 So you have years, and you can open each year up. 12:21 And navigate by month, and little discrete pieces of activity, 12:23 like adding a new friend, they get bundled up together. 12:28 Because that's the unit of meaning. 12:30 It doesn't matter that I've, that I need 12:33 20 separate entries for adding 20 separate friends. 12:35 I just wanna know that in August I made 20 new friends. 12:38 [BLANK_AUDIO] 12:39 So this clustering of information is something I 12:42 think we need to do more in our archives. 12:44 [BLANK_AUDIO] 12:46 And this is, this is really clever. 12:49 This is pretty advanced, but I also think this is about as far as you can 12:51 go without really, you know, doing this automatically 12:56 without really asking users to ex, explicitly provide information. 13:00 Now, I think that I think we have 13:07 this bias towards collecting data from our users. 13:09 We, we think that anything that's automatic is great 13:14 because that doesn't take any effort from our users, 13:17 and we think anything that requires user input is 13:20 bad because well, what if people don't wanna do this? 13:23 This is too much work. 13:26 But, Flickr, old school Flickr, was the master of getting 13:27 information out of users of getting explicit information. 13:33 They, gave, they, they made the concept of tagging. 13:39 Really, really prevalent across the web, sure, but 13:45 they also gave these other tools to their users. 13:47 They gave sets, collections, and galleries. 13:50 Sets are what you think of as a normal full album, it's 13:53 just a collection of photos and collections are one, one level up. 13:55 They group collection, other collections then sets together 14:01 and Galleries, there are two, two rules with Galleries. 14:05 You could have up to 18 photos, and all of the photos had to be from other people. 14:08 You couldn't provide your own photos. 14:14 And the, the point of Galleries was just that you, they wanted 14:17 you to look at Flickr and, and bring back some specific perspective. 14:20 Some specific frame, 14:26 [BLANK_AUDIO] 14:28 And did, did users use these tools? 14:31 They did. 14:34 They didn't mind the effort. 14:36 [BLANK_AUDIO] 14:37 They created these and shared these and commented on these and the key to 14:40 their use was that you could share any of these units 14:45 privately or publicly, and this is incredibly flexible, right. 14:51 So I could, if I went on a trip to New York, I 14:56 could take my com, my entire photo stream completely private, and then maybe 15:00 to share with my family, I would take some photos of the hotel 15:05 and, and some of the, I don't know, tourist traps that I go to. 15:09 And then maybe with my design friends, I take some of those photos and put 15:14 them in a new collection, but I also 15:19 included an entire album about the high line. 15:21 And I can share that. 15:24 [BLANK_AUDIO] 15:25 It's incredibly powerful 15:27 [BLANK_AUDIO] 15:30 And I encourage users to revisit their collection over and over again, to derive 15:33 new meaning from their existing body of work by manipulating this information. 15:39 By giving them handles to, to do something with their data. 15:44 [BLANK_AUDIO] 15:48 Heres another thing, most activity feeds 15:52 organize items by reverse chrono, reverse chron-order. 15:57 Right? 16:01 Most recent and then a day ago, and then a week ago 16:01 and they look a little bit like this, they're just unconnected dots. 16:06 [BLANK_AUDIO] 16:09 But, I think what's missing here is, is cause and effect. 16:11 Right, the way we talk about the past you know lets 16:18 say, there was a github issue, that someone filed a bug. 16:22 And the way we talk about this is, we're like, oh, so-and-so found this bug and 16:26 then someone else wrote in to confirm that 16:31 they could produce this bug on their machine. 16:33 And then another person chimed in and, related it 16:35 to this other ticket that had already been filed. 16:40 And then finally, someone submitted a patch that fixed it. 16:43 Right. 16:47 So it's a little bit more like this. 16:48 [BLANK_AUDIO] 16:49 There's cause and effect and 16:52 [BLANK_AUDIO] 16:53 we create these atoms online, and we put them online and they get shared, and they 16:55 get favorited, and reblogged, retweeted, and they take on their own life. 17:01 They go on their own journeys. 17:08 They have their own history. 17:10 This is version one Mixel. 17:11 And, what I loved about, what you could do with the collages was that you could take, 17:13 you could create a snippet of a fragment of an image and use that in your collage. 17:18 But, someone else could also take that image, 17:24 and use it, reuse it in their collage. 17:28 And you could actually follow the life of that particular image 17:31 fragment, and see how it was used across all of Mixel. 17:33 I think that's great. 17:39 Right. 17:41 And we, we should really preserve and present the journeys of our atoms. 17:42 In our systems as well. 17:47 Just, as another example, on Rdio, if someone 17:48 shares a song with me and then I, if I listen to it and I add it to my 17:53 collection, sure these are all separate events to a computer, right? 17:58 Maybe that person sent that song to me 2 18:04 months ago and I never got around to, to listening 18:07 to it until now, and so they might appear 18:10 far, far apart on my activity feed, but they're related. 18:13 They're obviously related and when I look back on my activity, I 18:18 would wanna see that information presented, 18:23 this relationship presented to me as well. 18:25 [BLANK_AUDIO] 18:27 So, like I said I, I think we can imagine and 18:31 automatically capture a lot of these 18:34 sequences, but they're simply starting points. 18:36 And I think if we give users tools to tell 18:40 more complicated stories than we can imagine, they'll do it. 18:44 These are story telling tools. 18:48 Another example that I think a lot of you will be familiar with is do 18:51 your list apart redesign that happened recently which is gorgeous. 18:56 I'm a typographer at first, so the first thing that appeared in my Twitter 19:02 timeline when people were talking about it was how gorgeous the large type was. 19:06 [BLANK_AUDIO] 19:10 But the second thing I latched onto was their archive page, and I don't 19:13 have a screen shot of it here, but I'll just very quickly describe it. 19:16 All the articles are sorted by author, that's a piece of automatic data that 19:20 you get for free Just from their very smart tagging in CMS system and they also 19:26 you know sorted the articles by topic, 19:32 you know design, you know development, content strategy, 19:34 but it's still really hard if you were a new designer or a new developer and 19:39 you were digging through the history of the 19:46 web as represented in the OS apart archive, right? 19:48 [BLANK_AUDIO] 19:52 The design topic could be broken out really into the initial 19:54 move away from tables and starting to think about web standards and HTML 19:59 and CSS and then, you know, then the the Dao article 20:05 that was really influential came into being, and that's like a separate period. 20:10 And after that, there was a huge phase 20:16 of adaptive web design and responsive web design. 20:18 And so if I went to the design topic page, 20:21 I would wanna see this sort of history broken out. 20:24 I don't wanna just see 1000 articles were tagged as design. 20:28 This is what I think we should be thinking 20:34 about in terms of the shape of our content. 20:37 [BLANK_AUDIO] 20:39 Now of course we already have places to tell these stories. 20:43 Right, we have Twitter, we have Instagram, we 20:47 have Facebook, and so I think one question, 20:51 one way to answer the question of how 20:55 can we make these archives more relevant to people. 20:57 How do we reach more people? 21:00 Is to already be, is to be increasingly visible on the 21:02 platforms people are already on and to tell your stories there. 21:06 [BLANK_AUDIO] 21:08 I'm, I'm gonna shift gears a little bit and talk about three different projects. 21:11 [BLANK_AUDIO] 21:16 The first project is an art project by James Bridle who lives in the UK. 21:19 And he made this thing called Dronestragram. 21:25 Dronestragram reports every single drone strike made by the US military. 21:30 He takes the satellite view of the location of that drone 21:36 strike, puts a photo filter on it, because, why not, it's Instagram. 21:39 And then in the description of each photo, in the caption of 21:44 each photo, he posts a description of what happened in that strike. 21:50 And what's great about this, is that we 21:55 haven't quite understood how drone strikes work really. 21:59 We don't really understand it. 22:03 Maybe you read one article or two and you have a 22:04 sense of like okay, in a year there's 200 strikes and OK. 22:08 But, I check Instagram a couple times a day and every week 22:16 or so between photos of my friends, I see something like this. 22:20 And through this I get a real sense of the pace of these drone strikes. 22:25 [BLANK_AUDIO] 22:30 I really start to understand time in this way that I would 22:32 not be, be able to through, a piece in the New York Times. 22:35 Here's another example. 22:41 This is the real time Titanic account that was created by The History Press 22:42 to commemorate the 101st anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic 22:51 and it tweeted hypothetical bits and pieces of text and photos 22:55 based on research material for an entire month leading up to the sinking and for 23:02 most of the time it was kinda funny. 23:07 It was a lot of very like tweets because no one 23:09 on the ship really knew what was gonna happen, but we do. 23:13 And that's interesting there's, there's this tension here, right. 23:16 We know how this story ends. 23:20 [BLANK_AUDIO] 23:21 And I would be checking Twitter throughout the day 23:23 and seeing tweets from my friends and seeing this 23:29 [SOUND] and it sort of, I'm sort of halfway in this 23:35 world in the early 1900's and halfway in, 23:41 you know, in today, today's time. 23:47 And every, and life goes on in my time. 23:54 Even though the world is falling apart here. 23:57 [BLANK_AUDIO] 24:00 So I think, I think these two projects 24:03 exist as polar opposites of this, of a continuum. 24:06 The Titanic account had a very obvious narrative. 24:12 They, they knew where they were gonna start. 24:14 They knew where they were gonna end, and Joseph Graham is kind of just 24:16 you know there's no narrative there, it's just a way of trying to understand drones. 24:21 And this third project sort of sits some, somewhere in the middle. 24:26 This is a Twitter account called the Library of Aleph. 24:30 And it's this guy who goes through the 24:34 Library of Congress photo archives and he looks 24:37 at the photos and when he sees an 24:42 interesting caption, he posts the caption on Twitter. 24:44 [BLANK_AUDIO] 24:48 He doesn't link to the photo. 24:51 It's just, it's just the caption. 24:52 And so this sort of started out like Instagram or Junkstagram. 24:55 There was no real narrative. 24:58 But it found a narrative in July of this year. 24:59 [BLANK_AUDIO] 25:04 He was in the archives when the ruling of George Zimmerman came out. 25:10 And for those of you who don't, for those of you 25:18 who don't know, George Zimmerman was tried for killing a black man 25:21 and he was ruled innocent. 25:28 And so, this accounts are re-tweeting a couple of other things from history. 25:31 And I wanted to read a couple of them here. 25:36 Martin Luther King Jr pulls up the cross that was burned on the 25:40 lawn of his, of his home, as his son stands next to him. 25:45 Atlanta, Georgia. 25:49 Execution of 38 Sioux Indians at Mankato, Minnesota, December 26th, 1862. 25:52 Japanese merchant posts sales sign in preparation 26:01 for evacuation as small son looks on. 26:04 Lynching of Leo Frank, Marietta, Georgia. 26:08 Lynching, Sikeston. 26:13 Contrabands coming into camp in consequence of the proclamation. 26:18 A group of contrabands. 26:21 The ghetto, Chicago, Illinois. 26:27 The ghetto, New York, New York. 26:30 The public swimming pool has been changed into 26:35 a private pool, in order to remain segregated. 26:37 African American woman being carried to police 26:42 patrol wagon during demonstration in Brooklyn, New York. 26:44 [BLANK_AUDIO] 26:47 It sort of spontaneously found a story. 26:53 I don't think the person who created this account had 26:59 any objective when he started, but that night, in the middle 27:01 of all the anger and all the frustration that was coming 27:06 out in waves, and waves online, this, there was this account. 27:09 And it, it kept going. 27:14 It went through the night and it went on to the next day, every 20, 27:17 30 minutes relentless and not only did it 27:22 hold meaning for people, it created new meaning. 27:29 It was an act of renewal this dusty stuff from the turn of the last century, 27:33 met people's anger and it told them, this is not new, this has happened before. 27:39 And it told them, you are not alone in this. 27:45 [BLANK_AUDIO] 27:48 These are, these are all tiny time machines. 27:54 You're in the present. 27:58 You are always in the present because you were born in this decade, in this century. 27:59 But these tiny time machines open a little portal back 28:04 to a specific time, just big enough to fit you. 28:09 It is the ladder to the past. 28:13 It feels more real because it is imbedded in 28:17 the networks you use, everyday, as part of your life. 28:19 And you see these stories being told, or 28:24 you construct your own stories, from what you're seeing. 28:26 Stories from a long time ago, being told in you. 28:29 We don't need to design dusty shelves. 28:34 This is why they matter, why the past 28:37 matters, because they coexist with us in the present. 28:39 They're not things we put in a tidy box and forget. 28:45 They're part of the stories we tell each other today. 28:49 They are lenses that are personal and often political. 28:51 And they help us understand what's going on. 28:54 This stuff online, things that we spent 28:58 hours and days and months working and building 29:02 and that people have spent so many 29:06 hours putting their effort, time and effort into. 29:09 [BLANK_AUDIO] 29:13 Isn't it a shame that you just forget about this, this stuff is our heritage 29:14 and we should be taking better care of it. 29:23 Thank you. 29:25 [SOUND] 29:29