=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-499/paper-7
|storemode=property
|title=Experiences with a Publicly Deployed Tool for Reminiscing
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-499/paper07-Cosley.pdf
|volume=Vol-499
}}
==Experiences with a Publicly Deployed Tool for Reminiscing==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-499/paper07-Cosley.pdf
Experiences with a publicly deployed tool for reminiscing
Dan Cosley1, Victoria Schwanda1, S. Tejaswi Peesapati1,2,
Johnathon Schultz1, Jonathan Baxter1
1 2
Information Science College of Engineering and Science
Cornell University, Ithaca NY 14850, USA Louisiana Tech University, Ruston LA 71272, USA
{drc44, vls48, stp53, jtb42, jts228}@cornell.edu
ABSTRACT newspaper story [4], seeing a nostalgic cultural icon such as a
This paper discusses the design and use of Pensieve, a system that classic car [7], or hearing a particular song [13] may trigger.
prompts people to reminisce through emails containing either Second, Pensieve chooses triggers from both a set of non-
social media content or text prompts about common life personalized prompting questions based on common life
situations. We discuss how existing research on reminiscence situations (a common strategy for group reminiscence therapy
informed design goals and tradeoffs in the creation of Pensieve, [13]) and from content people already create in social media sites
then analyze data collected from 72 people’s use of the system such as Flickr, Blogger, and Twitter. This content is often laden
over four months. We find that people valued the spontaneous with personal significance and, because most social media sites
reminders to reminisce and the ability to write responses to these emphasize current activity, it is rarely revisited—making it ideal
prompts; based on their responses, we find that shorter, more for supporting reminiscence. Pensieve also allows people to write
general prompts are better and that personalized pictures draw more about their memories, a goal of many people [4], by
more responses, but less thoughtful ones, than the text prompts. responding to these memory triggers.
We conclude with a number of design ideas for both researchers
and designers at the intersection of technology and reminiscence. We make several contributions to both design and research at the
intersection of technology and reminiscence. We first describe
Categories and Subject Descriptors Pensieve, describing how the existing literature on reminiscence
shaped the design goals and informed the tradeoffs we made in
H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g., HCI)]: building it. We then present a preliminary analysis of data
User Interfaces collected from 72 users over four months. In this period, over
8,000 triggers were sent, while people wrote over 650 responses
General Terms and provided feedback about their experiences with Pensieve.
Design, Experimentation, and Human Factors
We analyze these responses and this feedback in order to provide
Keywords insights into the ways people reminisce using Pensieve. In
Reminiscence, memory, autobiography, social media general, Pensieve facilitates people’s reminiscing practices as
described in the research literature; people like both the
1. INTRODUCTION spontaneity of and the ability to respond to triggers. A temporal
This paper describes the design and initial use of Pensieve [4], a analysis shows that people tend to respond to triggers either
prototype system that supports people in reminiscing. quickly or not at all. People also tend to respond more often to
Reminiscence is a valuable activity throughout a person’s life shorter text prompts than longer ones, and more often to
[12], and a number of systems have been developed to support personalized pictures rather than these text prompts—but the
memory and reminiscence, from supporting photo sharing (e.g. responses to pictures sometimes appear to be metadata rather than
[1][10]) to capturing relatively complete records of everyday reminiscence. Our data suggest that aggregating reminiscing
experience [5] using technologies such as sensecam [9] which content and supporting social aspects of reminiscing are
automatically takes pictures throughout the day. promising directions for future research.
Pensieve differs from these other systems; rather than focusing on 2. PRESENTING PENSIEVE
capture and retrieval of memory-related information, it leverages Pensieve has two main functions: to remind people to reminisce,
existing practices around capture and supports the less structured, and to allow people to write about their reactions to these
more spontaneous [13] activity of reminiscing. Pensieve has two reminders. These reminders, or “memory triggers”, are sent by the
key features. First, it sends occasional memory triggers through Pensieve server, which chooses when to send triggers and which
email. These triggers arrive at unexpected times with the goal of triggers to send, based on people’s preferences for receiving email
causing the same sort of spontaneous reminiscence that reading a and the social media sites they have linked to Pensieve. It
packages the memory triggers as emails; Figure 1 shows examples
This space intentionally left blank for copyright notices. of triggers from Last.fm, Flickr, Twitter, and a non-personalized
memory prompt.
These emails are the primary interface for Pensieve, promoting
the primary goal of supporting reminiscence. A web interface
allows people to customize their experience, write about the
triggers they receive, and interact with the Pensieve team. On the
account page, people can turn Pensieve on or off, modify how
often they receive triggers, and link accounts on social media sites Respect privacy, provide control. The sometimes sensitive nature
to Pensieve. of reminiscing led us to a number of design decisions, including
not caching content from other sites and not using sites that
One of the main features of the Pensieve website is the diary, required passwords. One painful tradeoff was to minimize social
which exploits the metaphor of a real diary. People can see and features. Even though reminiscence is often social in nature [4]
write about every memory trigger Pensieve has sent, recording and we deeply believe in systems that explore ways to support
reactions or stories the trigger elicited. They can also make diary social reminiscing, we feared the accidental exposure of personal
entries by replying to an emailed memory trigger and can create information.
entries unassociated with a particular trigger. Pensieve also
provides ways for people to contribute. People can submit ideas Use multiple media. Both the research on reminiscing and our
for new non-personalized text prompts to be used as memory interviews suggested that a number of media, including pictures,
triggers, as well as providing feedback or answering questions newspaper stories, music, and smells, triggered reminiscence.
about their reactions to Pensieve. This led us to provide access to a variety of media including text
(Twitter, Blogger, non-personalized text prompts), pictures
2.1 Design goals (Picasa, Flickr), and music (Last.fm). We started with Picasa and
In addition to the main design goals of reminding people to Flickr because pictures are often evocative, and because the
reminisce and leveraging content people already create in social Pensieve developers had accounts. Twitter, Blogger, and Last.fm
media, the design of Pensieve was driven by a number of goals are very recent additions, so in this paper we focus on Picasa,
drawn from studies of reminiscing as well as our own experiences Flickr, and non-personalized prompts below.
with early prototypes and interviews [4].
2.2 Related Web Tools
Fit current practices. Many technologies aimed at supporting In addition to the research work on tools to support reminiscence,
reminiscing require new software or technologies (e.g., [1][10]) Pensieve is related to other websites that support capturing
that may not fit people’s current reminiscing practices. Pensieve memories such as Plinky, Joggle, OneNote, and Evernote. Like
was designed to use existing communication media and to Pensieve, Plinky uses prompts to encourage writing. Its prompts
leverage properties of reminiscing such as spontaneity [7]. are more general (e.g., What makes someone funny to you?), and it
Sometimes respecting practice led to compromises. For instance, allows people to see each others’ responses to prompts. Joggle
we planned to use SMS messages to increase the spontenaiety of and similar lifestreaming technologies support the aggregation of
reminders, but early prototype users preferred email so they could multiple social media, though again, without Pensieve’s focus on
have more control, and in the U.S., to pay less. reminiscence. Finally, Evernote and OneNote support capture in
Require minimal effort. For people who don’t currently use social context, although here the focus is on collecting information
media, we provide non-personalized prompts; for those who do, created by others rather than one’s own personal memories.
rather than having them import data into Pensieve we allow them
to point to existing accounts; we choose which content to send 3. USAGE DATA
rather than making people choose; and rather than making people Pensieve was released in late February 2009. As of June, it has 72
remember to visit the website, we push content through email. registered users (34 females, 20 males, 18 of undisclosed gender).
The emails themselves are simple. We resisted the temptation to Over half of the users (37) were aged 18-25, with 6 aged 26-35, 4
ask regular questions about how people used Pensieve in the aged 36-45, 6 aged 46-55, and 19 of undisclosed age. The
emails, thinking that although this would be good for data prevalence of youth probably stems from both Pensieve’s
collection, it would both increase people’s effort and be bad for spreading by word of mouth from the current research team (12 of
reminiscing. whom are also Pensieve users), as well as the relative prevalence
of younger people using social media. An initial analysis of
Figure 1. Example memory trigger emails from last.fm, Flickr, Twitter, and the non-personalized text prompts.
demographics did not find significant differences in use. We hope
to return to this analysis as Pensieve accumulates a wider variety
of users, since although reminiscence serves valuable purposes
throughout life [12], some research suggests it may be especially
valuable for the elderly [2].
Of the 72 users, only nine have turned Pensieve off, suggesting
either that people have effective mail filters or that they value
receiving the triggers:
“Will this site continue to be up even after the project is
over? I love waking up in the morning and reminiscing.
This is a great idea.”
The majority of people (38) receive triggers once per day; most of
the rest chose to receive triggers two or three times per week,
although a few chose to receive them three times per day. Once
per day is the default, suggesting that once per day is a plausible
choice for reminding people to reminisce.
3.1 Studying people’s responses to triggers
We focus on responses to triggers for several reasons.
Pragmatically, unlike the reminiscing itself which is private, Figure 2. Time between receiving a trigger and responding to
responses are visible to us. These responses do give insight into it. If people respond to triggers, they generally do shortly after
people’s reminiscing processes and topics, because they are receiving them.
generated in the moment. We analyzed a total of 654 responses by
44 of our 72 registered users. We discarded responses that were frequently used pronouns in their responses, 13.5% versus 11.4%
blank, test responses, and responses complaining about repeated in the LIWC personal writing corpus [8]. This suggests that
triggers (which happened sometimes because of a bug). people were a dominant topic of reminiscence, according both
Responses follow the log-log distribution that often characterizes with this benefit and earlier interviews that highlighted the
social media: 15 people had 10 or more responses; the median and importance of people in reminiscing [4]. Some people wrote
mean for respondents was 4 and 15, respectively, and for all responses saying they intended to get in contact with old friends
people were 1 and 9, respectively. they hadn’t talked to for a while, which suggests that Pensieve
helped people maintain and revive relationships.
3.1.1 Characterizing people’s responses People tended to respond less frequently to triggers that explicitly
In this section we present an initial exploration of the topics of referenced family members. When they did, the responses often
people’s responses, based on a coding scheme we are developing contained strong feelings. For example, for the prompt Your
that groups responses along the lines of family, schooling, music, favorite book as a child. Did you have your parents read to you,
work, and so on. The goal is to find common patterns of or did you read on your own?, one respondent was reminded
responses, as well as unusual responses, both to characterize about a grandmother who used to narrate bed-time stories; she is
people’s reminiscing behavior and to look for design inspiration. currently in the hospital, and the response was strongly emotional.
The coding scheme is still evolving, so the data presented here This leads us to wonder whether some topics led to very strong
should be taken as interesting preliminary observations rather than reminiscence that people are sometimes unwilling to share.
received truth. We also occasionally refer to the kinds of language
people use, as measured by Pennebaker et al.’s Linguistic Inquiry Not all responses were positive. Sometimes people disliked
and Word Count Tool (LIWC) that computes word frequencies in specific triggers: “This is a terrible trigger, I refuse to respond.”
linguistic categories such as pronouns and affect words [8]. The same trigger could sometimes produce both happy and sad
responses. One prompt asked people to reminisce about The birth
The literature on reminiscence calls out a number of positive of a sibling or their leaving home; did the arrival of a younger
aspects of reminiscence [12] About 2.6% of words people used in sibling or the departure of an older one bring nervousness or joy?
Pensieve are associated with positive emotions, while 1.2% are Some people with siblings responded that they felt happy when
associated with negative emotions, compared to 2.7% positive and their sibling left home, but one replied, “I am only child…It just
2.6% negative in a large corpus of personal writing [8]. This made me look that much more alone.”
suggests that on balance, people found reminiscence in Pensieve
to be a positive experience. 3.1.2 Temporal patterns in responses
We now turn to analyzing temporal aspects of how people
People tended to reminisce about love, fun, and friends, even if responded to triggers. Our data suggests that, like reminiscence
the prompts were not specifically about those topics. For example, itself, people’s writing around reminiscence is often spontaneous
the prompt Are there any songs that make you think about people and immediate, and that capture in the moment is important—but
in your life? led to reminiscence about friends and fun, as well as so is providing tools for aggregation and revisiting content.
about their teenage and college years—a time period called the
“reminiscence bump” from which people often draw their favorite If people are going to respond to a trigger, it’s likely that they are
books, movies, and records [6]. going to respond to it shortly after receiving it. Figure 2 shows
how long it takes people to respond to a trigger after Pensieve
A specific benefit of reminiscence is maintaining connections sends the email. There is a large spike within the first hour,
with other people [12]. LIWC analysis showed that people suggesting that people do, in fact, spontaneously reminisce given
a triggering event (and that many people have an unhealthy email
addiction!). About 61% (396/654) of trigger responses happen
within 24 hours of receiving the email.
For those triggers people respond to beyond 24 hours, it appears
that people are using the website to respond to a number of
previously received triggers in succession. Figure 3 shows the
inter-trigger response time; that is, for a given person, how long
after making one diary entry does it take them to make another?
About 38% (249/654) of diary entries happen within an hour of
the person’s previous entry; since Pensieve sends triggers at most
five times a day, this means people are responding to multiple
triggers using the diary. This behavior is consistent with people’s
reporting “chains” of reminiscing in an earlier study [4]. Figure 4
also suggests that people who respond do so regularly, with over
85% (557/654) of inter-trigger response times being seven days or
fewer. This suggests that systems that encourage people to write
as part of their reminiscence must provide regular writing
opportunities and reminders.
Figure 3. Time between diary entries by the same person.
For completeness, we also looked at the time of day and day of Most people who write, write regularly (top); writing is also
week when people responded to prompts. People followed a often bursty, with people responding to multiple triggers
roughly diurnal cycle in their activity, responding more during the within minutes (bottom).
day, less at night, and perhaps more at lunchtimes. No interesting
trends showed up in the day of week analysis. Table 2 shows the breakdown of prompts by emotional tone.
There were no significant differences in either response rate or
3.1.3 How trigger types influence responses response length, although prompts classified as both have the
The effectiveness of the triggers is crucial to systems like longest responses, followed by negative, then positive, then
Pensieve. Here, we discuss aspects of triggers that led to more neither. This order is the same as the order of the categories based
frequent and longer responses. We define a trigger’s response rate on the average number of parts, presumably reflecting the effect
as the number of times people responded to a trigger divided by of prompt length on response length. However, we did receive
the number of times it was sent, and a trigger’s response length as feedback that suggested people dislike negative prompts:
the average number of words in responses to that trigger.
“Why would you want to elicit bad memories?? My
We first look at non-personalized text prompts, since those are triggers have been very negative lately, and it makes me
consistent across participants and may inform the design of topics hate getting those emails.”
used in reminiscence group therapy [13] as well as systems like
Pensieve. Here, we examine whether prompt length and emotional The prompts people contributed support these findings. Five
tone affect people’s responses. people submitted 16 prompts. Supporting the preference for
shorter prompts, 10 had 10 or fewer words, while nine had one
We examine prompt length in two ways. Analogous to response part, six had two parts, and one had three parts. Nine of these
length, we define prompt length as the number of words a prompt prompts were positive and seven were neither positive nor
contains. We also define the number of “parts” a prompt contains negative; the overall positive tone of the prompts suggests that
as the number of separate clauses. For example, the following avoiding negative prompts may be a good design decision.
prompt has three parts: [Your first job]. [How did you get it], and
[who were your coworkers]? Prompts with more parts tend to Table 1. Responses for prompts by number of parts.
contain specific questions related to a general theme. Parts # of Avg. prompt Response Avg. response
Table 1 shows descriptive statistics for text prompts broken down prompts length Rate length
by number of parts. Longer prompts have lower response rates (by 1 42 19.0 8.5% 37.9
prompt length, R2=0.139; by parts, R2=0.552), although the
2 23 14.5 9.2% 47.6
response length increases (by prompt length, R2=0.121; by parts,
R2=0.0558). All of these trends are weak, but observable in the 3 21 17.5 7.7% 47.8
data, and suggest that more general prompts are likely to be easier 4+ 16 25.6 7.7% 67.3
to respond to.
We also explored whether the emotional tone of a text prompt
affected people’s responses. We classified individual prompts as Table 2. Responses for prompts by prompt emotional tone.
being positive, negative, both, or neither. Positive prompts contain Type # Avg. Avg. Response Avg. response
words such as favorite, fond, impressed, and best. Negative length parts Rate length
prompts contain words such as trouble, fight, embarrassing, and
disaster. The coding aligns with LIWC’s categories of positive Both 4 24.3 3.8 7.3% 71.0
and negative affect words (10.2% positive, 0.2% negative for Negative 17 18.7 2.5 8.3% 56.3
positive prompts; 0.5% positive and 3.9% negative for negative
prompts). Prompts can also be classified as containing both or Positive 36 13.1 2.1 8.9% 47.1
neither positive and negative words. Neither 45 13.3 1.9 8.0% 40.6
3.1.4 Media, personalization, and response rate On the other hand, one informant from an earlier prototype
Finally, we examined whether media type and personalization reported that seeing the same trigger multiple times caused him to
made a difference in how people responded to triggers. We focus reminisce differently each time. One purpose of reminiscing is to
on Picasa and non-personalized text prompts because the response come to terms with past events; people revisit some events many
rates for the other services are very low, partly because of bugs times as their understanding—and, according to theories of
that often generated malformed prompts for Flickr and partly autobiographical memory, the memory of the event itself [3]—
because the Twitter, Blogger, and LastFM services were added to changes over time.
Pensieve very recently People responded more often to Picasa Managing repetition is an important issue for systems that use
prompts (11%, 63/567) than text prompts (8.3%, 551/6628); this content to support reminiscence; even common “photo slide
difference was statistically significant (χ2(7809,1)=4.321, p<0.05). show” screensavers that cycle through a collection of pictures will
However, the character of responses was different. The average necessarily show duplicates many times. An interesting line of
Picasa response length was about 35 words, compared to about 47 research with both technical and social science aspects would be
for text prompts. An informal content analysis suggested that to estimate how likely a particular trigger will be to generate
people often responded to Picasa prompts with metadata about the responses. Pictures containing people may be more evocative than
picture (the people in it, the event it was taken at, or the location) those that don’t, since people tend to reminisce about others;
rather than actual reminiscence. One person suggested that we triggers that many people respond may be better candidates for
include information such as the album and caption to mitigate repetition, and so on. Personalizing these decisions would also be
responses that are just recalling the “who, what, where” and interesting: someone might particularly enjoy receiving triggers
encourage a higher level of emotional content. about a friend whose birthday it is or who they recently spoke
with.
Unfortunately, because Picasa was only used to send personalized
content, we can’t say whether the differences in response rates Couple capture with reminiscence. People want to write more
were because Picasa triggers were pictures or because they were when reminiscing than they currently do [4]. Pensieve’s diary
personalized. Based on the observation that responses to Picasa feature coupled writing with reminiscing, helping people record
focused on metadata, our tentative conclusion is that the non- personal content they might otherwise have forgotten. Minimizing
personalized text prompts are just as effective as personalized effort by allowing people to create diary entries through email
pictures at stimulating reminiscence. We are also curious about responses was a major reason the diary worked: 51% of diary
whether non-personalized pictures might be an effective way to entries were created through email (333 of 654).
support reminiscence, as [13] suggests. These data suggest that both minimizing user effort and allowing
people to write when reminiscence was most salient are valuable
4. DISCUSSION design strategies. One flaw in Pensieve’s interface was that it was
On balance, we consider Pensieve to be successful as a prototype.
not obvious that replying to an email would create a diary entry; it
Most people who sign up continue to receive emails (though we
likely would have done even better had this feature been more
can’t know whether they attend to the mail without intrusive
obvious. Lifelogging technologies such as MyLifeBits [5] offer
remote monitoring), and people send positive feedback suggesting
capture without user effort, but this very ease of use may make the
they value receiving triggers and having the ability to write about
content captured less salient for reminiscence [9].
reminiscing, even if they don’t actually do it:
Create value through aggregation. Fourteen people returned to
“I really like coming to the website and having this
previous pages of their diary, presumably to reflect on things they
personal space to write whatever I want about long-
had written previously. In general, aggregation provides value:
forgotten things.”
people often make lists of books they have read and movies they
“Although I don’t necessarily respond to the triggers have seen; they enjoy recognition for high levels of sustained
that often, it would feel weird not having prompts being performance such as being on the Amazon reviews leaderboard;
sent anymore.” they like having their photo collections in one place.
Below, we present several important considerations for systems Designs to support reminiscing might use aggregation as a
that support reminiscence. These are tentative and preliminary: strategy for creating value. For example, a design might support
our dataset is fairly large but is based on a snowball sample of “family portraits”, using either tagging or text analysis to create
people who self-selected as interested in reminiscence; it is mostly collections of reminiscing content related to specific others.
behavioral in nature, and would be better if supplemented with Another idea is making a “timeline” to support autobiographical
data about people’s beliefs and intentions; and our analysis here is writing by sending triggers such as Write about something that
preliminary in a number of respects, including an informal happened in 1989. Providing aggregate, organized views of
approach to data coding. Still, we believe the data and the reminiscence about family members or one’s own life might give
guidelines offer a real contribution to both researchers and people extra incentive to continue reminiscing. These approaches
practitioners in this area. might also help with the problem of managing repetition; people
Manage repetition. Because of a bug, a number of participants may remember a number of events about a family member or
with Picasa and Flickr accounts received the same picture several from a specific year. Sending the content people create in
times. People sometimes left feedback or diary entries noting they Pensieve as a memory trigger later is another potentially
had seen a repeated trigger, and generally disliked it: interesting strategy for supporting reminiscence.
“It is really frustrating when I get repeat triggers— and Support social aspects. One awkward tradeoff we made was to
lately I’ve been getting a lot of them.” protect privacy at the expense of social aspects of reminiscence.
We did include generic social features such as the ability to add
prompts and a forum for public discussion, but these were rarely the Pensieve website, and So-yae Jeong and Matt Lepage for
used. People commented on the lack of sociality: comments on the paper. This work was supported by NSF grant
“It seems likely that fully integrating into social sites IIS 0845351, Cornell University, and Dr. Geri Gay.
and using the relationships people express in them to
form groups will be helpful...”
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6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank Kathy Akey, Brian Alson, Mark
Broomfield, Soyoung Lee, and Chethan Sarabu for their work on