Why we need to save the material experience of software objects

Conversations at last month's Sustainable History: Ensuring today's digital history survives event [my slides] (and at the pub afterwards) touched on saving the data underlying websites as a potential solution for archiving them. This is definitely better than nothing, but as a human-computer interaction researcher and advocate for material culture in historical research, I don't think it's enough.

Just as people rue the loss of the information and experiential data conveyed by the material form of objects when they're converted to digital representations – size, paper and print/production quality, marks from wear through use and manufacture, access to its affordances, to name a few – future researchers will rue the information lost if we don't regard digital interfaces and user experiences as vital information about the material form of digital content and record them alongside the data they present.

Can you accurately describe the difference between using MySpace and Facebook in their various incarnations? There's no perfect way to record the experience of using Facebook in December 2013 so it could be compared with the experience of using MySpace in 2005, but usability techniques like screen-recording software linked to eyetracking or think-aloud tests would help preserve some of the tacit knowledge and context users bring to sites alongside the look-and-feel, algorithms and treatments of data the sites present to us. It's not a perfect solution, but a recording of the interactions and designs from both sites for common tasks like finding and adding a friend would tell future researchers infinitely more about changes to social media sites over eight years than simple screenshots or static webpages. But in this case we're still missing the notifications on other people's screens, the emails and algorithmic categorisations that fan out from simple interactions like these…

Even if you don't care about history, anyone studying software – whether websites, mobile apps, digital archives, instrument panels or procedural instructions embedded in hardware – still needs solid methods for capturing the dynamic and subjective experience of using digital technologies. As Lev Manovich says in The Algorithms of Our Lives, when we use software we're "engaging with the dynamic outputs of computation; studying software culture requires us to "record and analyze interactive experiences, following individual users as they navigate a website or play a video game … to watch visitors of an interactive installation as they explore the possibilities defined by the designer—possibilities that become actual events only when the visitors act on them".

The Internet Archive does a great job, but in researching the last twenty years of internet history I'm constantly hitting the limits of their ability to capture dynamic content, let alone the nuance of interfaces. The paradox is that as more of our experiences are mediated through online spaces and the software contained within small boxy devices, we risk leaving fewer traces of our experiences than past generations.

One thought on “Why we need to save the material experience of software objects”

  1. Seb Chan responded off-site to say "See also Nick Monfort's Trope Tank at MIT – http://trope-tank.mit.edu.

    Aaron and I (and many others) have been thinking about this but I do wonder if it really is all that different, at a metalevel, than any intangible heritage? (see also performing arts)"

    which is an excellent question. My feeling is that software interfaces provide affordances that are analogous to the physical protrusions, holes, buttons, handles, wear marks etc that help us interpret material objects, but the requirements for recording tacit knowledge and culture around them are similar to those for intangible cultural heritage. But where do you record things like the sound of a modem connecting? (Try this and see what it evokes: http://www.freesound.org/people/Jlew/sounds/16475/)

    Over on twitter, @AgainPlay from the Play It Again project which is 'researching the history and preservation needs of 1980s Australian and New Zealand digital games' shared links to the Popular Memory Archive http://playitagainproject.org/ and a paper backgrounding the vision, 'Remembrance of games past: the popular memory archive' http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2513570

    Ingrid Mason ‏@1n9r1d pointed me to the Australasian Heritage Software Database http://www.ourdigitalheritage.org/

    Glen Barnes ‏@barnaclebarnes said '+1. How do we record the experience of Snap Chat and Twitter? The Twitter archive is good but doesn’t archive experience, only data'.

    In other news, I've updated the blog template to try and fix whatever issue has been preventing people from posting comments – let me know on twitter (@mia_out) if you still can't comment! This also means that after seven years on a green theme, Open Objects has gone blue…

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