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Digital Legacy: A Systematic Literature Review

Published: 04 October 2023 Publication History

Abstract

To more effectively support the dying and bereaved in end-of-life contexts, over the past two decades HCI and social computing scholars have sought to understand digital legacy. In this paper, we argue that it is time to take stock of digital legacy scholarship, examining what we know, what gaps remain, and what areas are imperative for future work. Through a Grounded Theory Literature Review, we identify four foci in digital legacy research to date: how identity is navigated in the passing of digital legacy, how digital legacies are engaged with, how digital legacies are put to rest, and how technology interfaces with offline legacy technologies. Based on our analysis, we present a model depicting how digital legacy research examines a lifecycle of data as it is passed down. This model identifies that digital legacy data moves through three stages: encoding, accessing, and dispossessing. The model illustrates gaps in current research and charts possible inflection points for future social computing research. Specifically, we highlight the importance of multi-user and multi-generational networks of people in end-of-life scenarios. Additionally, the model exhibits emerging theoretical findings and major concepts in the nascent field of digital legacy research.

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 7, Issue CSCW2
CSCW
October 2023
4055 pages
EISSN:2573-0142
DOI:10.1145/3626953
Issue’s Table of Contents
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 October 2023
Published in PACMHCI Volume 7, Issue CSCW2

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Author Tags

  1. death
  2. digital legacy
  3. end of life
  4. heirlooms
  5. identity
  6. inheritance
  7. legacy
  8. literature review
  9. memorial
  10. memory
  11. stewardship

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  • National Science Foundation

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  • (2024)Data After Life: A data donor card to provoke questions concerning post-mortem data useCompanion Publication of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3656156.3663726(149-152)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
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