Soon, we will have been married to each other for 50 years. As part of the celebration and reflection on what we have done and what has happened to us, we started listing events that mattered in retrospect for each of the years. Naturally, some years are difficult. We can't think of something that happened in that year. But as often happens, modern digital inventions and practice sometimes comes to our aid.
We have taken many photos over the years, of course. There is something to appreciate, by itself. Back in the early days of photography, you know that large black heavy cameras that stood on a tripod and had a hood to block out daylight while the photographer or assistant fired a long narrow tray of combustible material? Then, Kodak and Brownie Hawkeye point and shoot cameras and all that. But ever since our first digital camera, probably a Canon, for at least $200, we have skipped the old film and development process. An important by-product of modern digital images is their "Properties", often a choice with a right click on a PC on the file that is the digital image.
More up-to-date people than us probably have geo-tags and labels on their pictures. Geo-tags give information on where the picture was taken and labels can be used to sort, group or find pictures with a given label. So far, we haven't bothered with either of these. But often the properties of a picture include the date on which the picture was taken. That information given to two researchers like us can fuel a cascade of associations, comparisons and inferences. The date information and our use of it reminded me of the data science article that appeared on the O'Reilly blog yesterday
I got a small electric picture frame as a gift. It shows a set of 30 - 50 pictures continuously looping through them. I have it sitting beside this computer and suddenly there is photo of my mother as a young woman or my now-retired sister at about 4 years of age gazing into a frog pond. When I first heard of an eframe, I thought "What a waste of money and resources!" That is possibly a valid reaction but having your own picture show can be surprisingly powerful, especially when it catches you unawares.
