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This is rather lovely. Yahoo! has worked with Jonathan Har­ris to cre­ate a dig­i­tal time cap­sule. The cap­sule is open for 30 days end­ing 8th Novem­ber and allows Yahoo! users to con­tribute con­tent (writ­ten, pho­to­graphic, video, audio) under 10 broad cat­e­gories. After this date, the result­ing cap­sule will be will be ‘sealed’ and entrusted to Smith­son­ian Folk­ways Record­ings based in Washington.

The capsule’s cre­ator explains:

The aes­thetic of the Time Cap­sule is that of a ball of thread, spin­ning like a globe, its shift­ing sur­face entirely com­posed of words and pic­tures sub­mit­ted by peo­ple around the world. The thread ball con­cept relates to threads of mem­ory and threads of time, where threads are taken to be any con­tin­u­ous and self-consistent nar­ra­tive strand. When the Time Cap­sule opens, it dis­plays the 100 most recent con­tri­bu­tions, which form the spin­ning globe. The ten themes orbit the globe in a pin­wheel pat­tern. At any moment, any indi­vid­ual tile can be clicked, caus­ing the globe to fall away and the selected tile to expand, reveal­ing detailed infor­ma­tion about the tile and the per­son who cre­ated it. Using a search inter­face, view­ers can spec­ify the pop­u­la­tion they wish to see, explor­ing such demo­graph­ics as “men in their 20s from New York City”, and “Iraqi women who sub­mit­ted draw­ings in response to the ques­tion: What do you love?”. There are an infi­nite num­ber of ways to slice the data, and each result­ing slice then becomes its own thread, which can be browsed inde­pen­dently, tile by tile, like a filmstrip.

Jonathan Har­ris spe­cialises in cre­at­ing won­der­fully evoca­tive dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences. They tend to have a touch of whimsy about them. They are also addic­tively com­pul­sive with beau­ti­fully intu­itive inter­faces. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out 10x10 and we feel fine (as well as his other work here).

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