Life Wall Pro – and Refinements – and the Baby Pictures

bat Life Wall v2 2011-09-22

bat Life Wall v2 2011-09-22

The elements of the Life Wall have been encouraging me to dig out all sorts of stuff that was buried away, and recall events and dates (sometimes with the aid of my wife and others) which were already only dimly there.  But they have been brought back to vivid life through developing my personal Life Wall.  I assume everyone will want photos of them when very young on their Life Wall… there are few events in life as important as being born! The baby photos of me at a few months old and age 1 year are up there now. Did I look cute then?

The live Life Wall is at http://atate.org – Hover a mouse over a tag or clipping for more detail. Click on the thumbnails for some larger versions of the images.

Life Map

I had already added a link to a “Life Map” on which I think a lot of life’s experiences could be noted through places visited and dated events.  I feel this element of the Life Wall could be so valuable, that I have adjusted the clippings column that will map to one HD screen of presentation to allow for an embedded Life Map directly on the main display.  There is a link to a larger map which could then be shown over 2 X HD displays when clicked.

Life Map Pro

The Life Wall idea and presentation could also be adapted to professional purposes, e.g. to collect together and present a researcher’s entire scientific contribution. It could allow then to look at their work and relationships. They could bring in professional contacts and the mappings between people, projects, organisations, tools, etc. Displays could include professional social network and project relationship diagrams (e.g. CMU Catalyst), FOAF, knowledge asset roadmaps (Macintosh, Filby and Tate, 1998), etc.  I am developing this aspect now.  As for Life Map Personal I hope to make the approach reasonably general and create an empty Life Map web area which others can copy and adapt to use themselves.

Reference

Ann Macintosh, Ian Filby and Austin Tate (1998) “Knowledge Asset Road Maps” Proc. of the 2nd Int. Conf. on Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management (PAKM98) Basel, Switzerland, 29-30 Oct. 1998, (U. Reimer, ed.). Available from http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/oplan/documents/1998/98-pakm98-roadmaps.pdf

Comments
  • Siân Bayne says:

    Your wall got me thinking about the internet and memory, and whether memory is the retrieval of knowledge (of the past) already ‘there’, or more of a construction of the past in the act of remembering… Anyway I found a paper which puts Berners-Lee alongside Plato on memory and the question of the internet, in an interesting way:

    http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.125.9466&rep=rep1&type=pdf

  • Austin Tate says:

    I also think that we are doing much more than recall when we uses these sorts of presentations and tools. We are identifyign and contructing threads, collections and themes, and placing individual elements into those in a way that enhances the expertience and provides new conceptualisations of them.

    See the Knowledge Asets Maps paper for some of my terminology of Facets, Threads and Ties which I have used over many years to assist in this process when road mapping for programmes and on consultancies.