Digital Legacy: A Systematic Literature Review

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This blog post summarizes the paper “Digital Legacy: A Systematic Literature Review” which presents a systematic literature review of end-of-life digital legacy scholarship in HCI literature to-date. This paper will be presented at the 26th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, a top venue for social computing scholarship. It will also be published in the journal Proceedings of the ACM (PACM).

Moments surrounding the death of a loved one can be, and often are, fraught with emotional, spiritual, and logistical dilemmas that are destabilizing and painful. The toll the death of a loved one can take is exacerbated by questions about what gets passed down by the deceased and where or to whom it goes next. Legacy materials that get passed down can include values, wishes, identities, objects, digital content, heirlooms, or many other meaningful items. Both the tangible items like heirloom objects and more amorphous things like values form a legacy that is passed down, often to a recipient such as a bereaved loved one.

As technology — especially digital accounts and data — make up a greater percentage of what is passed on by those who die, it is increasingly important for designers to consider the potential role their systems may play in the passing down of digital legacy. But designing for the passing of digital legacy runs into challenges due to it being a process that occurs over time and between people across a diverse set of familial connections, social systems, geographies, and cultures. Technologies must consider not only what digital legacy materials (systems, accounts, and data) are included in an individual’s digital legacy, but also how an individual’s digital legacy is shared and received across multiple generations of other individuals within complex social environments.

To aid in the design of more effective technologies, over the last two decades, HCI and social computing scholars have published important research on digital legacy. However, the scholarship examining digital legacy has been varied in how it has empirically attended to the social complexities of passing digital legacy. With a diverse critical mass of scholarship now published about digital legacy, this study takes stock of this area as a whole, examining what we know, what gaps remain, and what areas are imperative for future work. To this end, we present the results of a Grounded Theory Systematic Literature Review (GTLR) of digital legacy scholarship to-date.

We found that CSCW and the broader HCI community focus on four key areas: 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 (e.g., virtual gravestones). We also find that digital legacy literature is interested in a broader data lifecycle. We find that in this lifecycle data moves through three interdependent stages on its way to final deletion: encoding, accessing, and dispossessing.

A conceptual model with three stages which represents that digital legacies move through a three stage lifecycle that includes encoding the legacy content into a digital form, accessing that content, and the dispossession of that legacy to another individual or through deletion.

Interpreting the data cycle we identify through our literature, we present a digital legacy data lifecycle model depicting how digital legacy data is passed down across generations. The data lifecycle model highlights that digital legacy material is acquired and re-acquired across multiple end-of-life stages and across multiple generations of individuals. The model seeks to illustrate and interpret how digital legacy literature depicts the path of data as it is passed down, the technical challenges in designing for the path of data depicted, and research gaps that should be addressed in future research.

A conceptual model which represents that digital legacies move through multiple users throughout their lifecycle. Depending on the form the legacy takes (social media, private archive, or forgotten account) the relationship between the deceased and the recipient may appear different.

A conceptual model which represents that digital legacies may encounter multi-generational transitions throughout their lifecycle. The considerations of encoding, access, and dispossession change depending on who is receiving the legacy and what type of legacy they are receiving.

We contribute a synthesis of HCI digital legacy literature; literature that often examines the social complexities of data management as data passes from the dead to the living, and between the living. By presenting this synthesis through a lifecycle model we seek to help CSCW researchers and designers identify the most pressing inflection points through which social computing research can contribute.

Dylan Thomas Doyle and Jed R. Brubaker. 2023. Digital Legacy: A Systematic Literature Review. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 7, CSCW2, Article 268 (October 2023), 26 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3610059