Enhancing Digital Literacy by Multi-modal Data Mining of the Digital Lifespan

Social media pervades modern digital society, yet despite its regular use the general level of digital literacy and awareness of online representations of self remain low. We report progress on the RCUK DE funded ‘Charting the Digital Lifespan’ project, which promotes digital literacy of social media through design of novel technological interventions that raise awareness of the digital personhood. We describe progress towards automatic social media data-mining capable of categorising photographs and associated comments into high-level semantic concept groups elicited from digital anthropological study. We describe how this pilot system has been incorporated into live trials of technologies that visualize and encourage reflection upon digital personhood.