Perhaps a testament to the growing awareness of digital afterlife issues, a number of events have sprung up recently ostensibly focused on the topic.  Here are the ones that I have learned about.  Let me know if you have one that isn’t listed here.

HCI at the End of Life
April 10th, 2010
Workshop at CHI 2010 restricted to those who submitted position papers. Primarily an academic audience.
Cost: $175 plus variable costs for CHI.

Afterlife & Death in a Digital Age
April 17th, 2010
One day seminar at the National University of Singapore. Again, a primarily academic audience.
Cost: free

Digital Death Day
May 20th, 2010
This event is a one-day un-conference co-located with the 10th Internet Identity Conference in Mountain View, CA. It’s audience seems to be primarily professional.
Cost: $75

While I have some academic pursuits, the exclusivity of the CHI workshop and the distance required to visit Singapore will keep me away. I’m seriously considering Digital Death Day. It looks to be the the most relevant and accessible to me.

The British Library recently launched the UK Web Archive, a repository designed to archive UK Web sites for posterity. Their site states that it “contains sites that reflect the rich diversity of lives and interests throughout the UK.” The archive presently contains approximately 6,000 Web sites and users can nominate sites for inclusion. In the nomination form users are asked to submit a justification for inclusion with examples “a typical business blog, a prize winning site, representative of Internet culture or even humorous.”

It makes perfect sense that an archiving service, like the UK Web Archive, should limit its collection. With limited resources, they must consider the greater desire for patrons to view the content in the future. At our Core Conversation at SXSW 2009, one participant stated that you need not worry about the digital afterlife if you weren’t significant enough for the Library of Congress. While that’s true for larger archives, it’s not true for niche audiences. Consider that your descendants might want to view your content, even though it is not significant enough for a large archive. Also consider small social communities or communities of practice. Perhaps content is significant to one of these smaller groups, but not to the larger archive.

I’m excited to see more digital archives come about to archive niche content. And while the UK Web Archive is more niche than a general Web archive, I think there’s great potential for even more Web content to be preserved for posterity.

Photo: I couldn’t help but use this “archive of flowers” from Aureusbay on Flickr.

A list of events at SXSW that all deal with digital identities and afterlife.

Virtual Interviews: A Chat With Darwin’s Ghost
#syntheticinterview
Ralph Vituccio and John Dessler
Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center
Synthetic Interview is a unique technology that allows people to have a conversation with a character or persona as if that person were present in real-time. The goal is creating immersive experiences, allowing guests to interact with a digital character from either the past, the present or the future.

People Die, Profiles Don’t
#peopledieprofilesdont
Jesse Davis with Entrustet
Talk about companies and how they deal with users deaths. What can websites do to streamline the process of handling the deceased’s wishes for their online accounts?

eSee Technologies
#eSeetech
Ian Mitchell
Augmented Reality device that may serve life loggers and average Web users alike at eseetechnologies.com.

I also saw this article that Apple has hired Richard DeVaul of AWare Technologies who is an expert in heads up technology. Can you say iSee?

What If Your Phone Had Five Senses?
#phonehad5senses
Ted Power of Google
The phone in your pocket has the sense of sight (camera), sound (microphone), touch and location. They also have sense of light, proximity, acceleration, orientation. All these senses potentially serve to describe your experiences and enrich your digital identity.

My Life, Take Two: The Right to Delete
#mylifetaketwo
Panel
Most of us have incidents in our past that we’d rather leave there – but that’s getting harder in a world teeming with tools and devices that capture our actions and record them forever. Do we have a ”right to delete” records and data about ourselves? Can we? Should we?

Have You Planned for Your Digital Afterlife?
Interview with Adel Mcalear
@DigitalLegacy