Reshaping reminiscence, web browsing and web search using personal digital archives [electronic resource]

Millions of consumers are accumulating logs of their social interactions on the Internet. These logs chronicle people's lives at a level never before possible. Instead of just retaining a few old pictures, letters and mementos from their personal histories as in previous generations, the participants of the digital age can have access to their detailed thoughts, interactions and communications over years or decades. Over the long term, these archives can be a wonderful source of memories and can capture deeply meaningful experiences and stories. However, many technical barriers obstruct the practical utility of these archives. Raw logs of activity are voluminous and not very interesting, unless people have engaging sense-making tools that help them easily organize the archive, spot patterns, view summaries, and navigate content. To this end, we design, implement and evaluate a system called Muse (Memories USing Email) which provides four novel types of cues to help spot interesting trends and messages in a large-scale email archive. These cues act as salient entry points into the archives, which can then be navigated with an interface that supports rapid browsing of messages. Muse is publicly available and has been downloaded over 6,000 times to date. Our user reports indicate a range of possible benefits from tools like \Muse, from utilitarian ones such as summarizing work or backing up attachments, to reminiscence and remembering family events and grad school years with nostalgia, to reinforcing confidence, renewing relationships and playing memory games. In addition, Muse provides convenient ways for archival organizations to process the email archives of prominent individuals and to provide them to researchers, thereby unlocking the historical value embedded in these archives. We also propose a new class of experience-infused applications that provide powerful, privacy-respecting forms of personalization with the help of personal archives. We demonstrate two important examples of such applications. The first is an experience-infused web browser that annotates web pages in real time as they are loaded, highlighting terms that the user has encountered before. Our studies find that this technique is useful to personalize crowded web pages and to serendipitously spot connections to things the user may have forgotten about. The second application is experience-infused web search. Here, we propose the idea of personal search engines that bias search results towards domains mentioned in the user's email or Twitter feeds. We find that these results can be used to boost user satisfaction with web search results and provide an analysis of the types of queries for which experience-infused search does well. Taken together, these applications provide a glimpse of an exciting future where consumers can easily look up history, supplement memory and improve information efficiency, thus putting their archives to work for their own benefit.

Advisor: Lam Monica S. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Heer Jeffrey Michael advisor. Thesis advisor
Winograd Terry advisor. Thesis advisor