Hartung-Gorre Verlag
Inh.: Dr.
Renate Gorre D-78465 Konstanz Fon: +49 (0)7533 97227 Fax: +49 (0)7533 97228 |
S
|
March 2012
Florian Müller
Remembering in the Metaverse:
Preservation, Evaluation, and Perception
1st
edition 244 pages. € 64,00. ISBN
978-3-86628-418-0
Electronic memory -
computing hardware and software that provides services to extend the capacity
of our biological memories - can be seen as the fulfillment of the
long-established vision of the MEMEX by Vannevar
Bush. In a world of ubiquitous computing, our digital shadows - the proportion
of our lives that has some digital representation - is no longer limited to
individual documents, but reflects the continuous activities in many parts of
our lives. Especially, our digital shadows are no longer isolated, but are
connected to other people's digital shadows in the space of social data and
software. Based on three specific case studies, this thesis tries to develop a
concept for a future metaverse archive: an electronic
memory infrastructure that enables the long-term preservation, evaluation and
dissemination of the information we acquire throughout our lives.
The first case study
focuses on preservation and introduces the Permanent Visual Archive
(PEVIAR) as a solution to digital preservation. Although electronic storage has
become abundant and quite cheap, the long-term preservation of information in
the digital realm still poses great challenges. While it is not yet clear
whether electronic memory ought to be perfect (in contrast to the benign
imperfection of our biological memories), the possibility of safely preserving
information in the long term must be given. PEVIAR offers a very specific kind
of electronic memory, one that is long-term stable, easily accessible, and
authentic, but also very static.
The second case study
focuses on the evaluation of data. It shows how social data can be used to
extract the history of collectives. The email communication of 151 individuals
working at the former Enron corporation (amounting to
a total of around a quarter of a million of messages) is processed in order to
reconstruct, visualize and analyze the social network between these
individuals. It will be shown how a physical simulation is suitable for
visualizing a very complex network while avoiding information overload and how
this simulation not only produces the basis for a suitable visualization, but
can further be used to analyze the data in combination with established graph
metrics.
The third study
focuses on perception and shows how context-aware display technologies
(more specifically, mixed reality) are an indispensable tool in the capture,
evaluation and dissemination of our digital corpora. Since much of the
information we acquire is directly related to a real-world context, the
recalling and consumption of this information should be able to consider this
relation. We focus on spatial context to demonstrate two crucial aspects of
context-aware information, namely (spatial) context detection and (spatial)
context integration. The concept of hybrid images - images that contain real
and virtual parts - is introduced as an example of a context-aware information
system applied to the field of architecture visualization.
The three case
studies are connected through their role as building blocks for a future
electronic memory infrastructure, the metaverse
archive. In the conclusion, we summarize the possibilities and limitations of
such an archive and highlight some of the societal implications that will need
to be addressed.
Keywords: electronic memory, MEMEX,
Vannevar Bush, digital shadow, social data, digital preservation, metaverse
archive.
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