It felt like one of the best ways for me to gather some examples and suggestions of what personal digital archaeology could look like, would be to take my own medicine!

The picture above is interesting to me, not only because I think of the boxes as a kind of treasure hunt, but also because of the little Mac on the dresser (an original Mac that my brother brought home from college).

Then there's the little wooden box sitting on top of the Mac; it is a box I used to gather pocket change, until I had enough to start a bank account for CFTW, the nonprofit organization. Next to it is a briefcase I received as a college graduation present, and it contains a fountain pen, among other things. See - even a picture of your room could lead to stories!

One Box at a Time

So I didn't keep exact count, but in this live experiment, I went through perhaps 3-5 boxes (of papers and various bits of things that had accumulated), and got rid of most of the stuff, kept what was most important, and then separated out a few things that were "most special", and scanned them.

For example, I enjoyed coming across this Luke Skywalker trading card, and I didn't hesitate to upload him to a Facebook photo album I have called "Heroes":

To make things easier, I planned to upload all of the items into a single Facebook photo album to start with, and make short captions for each.

Box-Filled Room Facebook Photo Album

I see the concept of a life story suitcase in broad terms: it can be anything you want it to be. For me, it's simply a way to gather "life media" together, and then do something with it.

In this example, it's more about gathering the material (by scanning it), and I'm not so concerned about having a topic or theme for the photo album. It's meant to be a kind of snapshot - everyone's suitcase will be different, but here are a few representative items. Generally speaking, they were either pictures, or pieces of paper, and I felt good about capturing them.

I'm also not going to be too concerned at the beginning about coming up with a lot of descriptive material for each item - a short caption, and that's it. Sort of like the seed of a story - and I could always come back later and add more; but it's at least a start. In Facebook, you also have the option of moving a picture to a new album, so if you tried something like what I'm doing here, you can always move pictures into albums that are created around a particular event, or topic.

Facebook Timeline

Facebook has a new feature called the "timeline" that will make things interesting, for travelling through your own history of what you post -- or visiting other people's life stories. As for me, I'm in favor of people digitizing whatever they feel comfortable sharing, and setting the privacy accordingly -- as long as Facebook makes it easy to get the material "off" of Facebook.