This paper explores self-tracking as a social practice with significant relationships to human memory. The history of data and memory is fraught with a concern that specifics of qualia are subjugated to datafication. Yet, historical perspectives linking paper diaries and digital tracking show that rich accounts can be preserved in media. Cognisant of both perspectives, this paper argues that rather than delegating reflection to algorithms, users engage critically. Using original research data, this paper demonstrates how users unite the sociotechnical affordances of devices, data visualisations, and personal narratives to communicate memory in mediated forms. In doing so, they bridge semantic and autobiographic memory, combining subjectivity and objectivity. A datafied narration of everyday life emerges, affirming unique and vital stories. Often directed toward future goals, the mnemonic value of self-tracking in the present is overlooked. Yet whether recalling unfortunate accidents, sporting success, work, holidays, or illness experiences, participants use data as a scaffold to build stories and affirm identity. This paper asserts that memory and storytelling is an essential anchor for practices of digital self-tracking.

The rise of digital technology has led to fundamental changes in how individual and collective perspectives on the past are transmitted and engaged. An immediate implication of these changes relates to the shift away from human communication as a single form of communication about memory towards multiple models which involve non-human (or robotic) agents. These non-human agents are primarily constituted by artificial intelligence (AI)-driven systems, such as search engines and conversational agents, which retrieve information about the past for human users and are increasingly used to generate memory-related content. To account for the growing complexity of memory-related digital communication, the article introduces three agency-based models of such communication: (1) human-to-human; (2) human-to-robot; and (3) robot-to-robot. It discusses examples of communication practices enabled by these models and scrutinises their implications for individual and collective memory transmission. The article concludes by outlining several directions for memory communication research increasingly shaped by non-human agents.

The article attempts to clarify what today constitutes communicative remembering. To revisit this basic mnemonic concept, our theoretical contribution starts from available approaches in social memory studies that assume a binary distinction between cultural and communicative modes of memory making. In contrast, we use concepts that treat them not as structural, historically and culturally distinct registers but as a repertoire of retrospection that hinges on the evoked temporal horizon and media usage. To further interrogate this practical articulation of memories, we direct our attention to the habitual, communicatively realised engagement with the past. We finally turn to the ways communicative remembering is done in digitally networked environments, which provide us with a pertinent mnemonic arena where rigid dichotomies of communicative memory versus cultural memory are eroded.

This article explores how the concept of remediation is part of digital memory work performed by young women on Instagram. While remediation has been used to make sense of the ways sites of memory are represented across time and through different media, mnemonic media practices and forms are remediated in digital memory work. This article draws on interviews, observations of Instagram activities, and focus group data to analyse how other media practices and forms are integrated into digital memory work on Instagram and mobilised by young women to make sense of their mnemonic use of the platform. The analysis focuses on how practices of digital memory work use direct remediation of material objects and remediation of the functionality of mnemonic media practices. It addresses how the comparisons participants make to other mnemonic media practices reveal how digital memory work involves negotiation of personal and public, private and professional, and the authentic and staged. In addition, it grapples with the way that sharing happy experiences and moments to produce a ‘highlight reel’ or ‘hall of fame’ in postfeminist digital culture has valuable and potentially harmful implications.

Colourised photographs have become a popular form of social media content, and this article examines how the digital sharing of colourised colonial photographs from the Sápmi region may develop into a kind of informal visual repatriation. This article presents a case study on the decolonial photographic practices of the Sámi colouriser Per Ivar Somby, who mines digitised photo archives, colourises selected photos, and subsequently shares them on his social media profiles. The article draws on a qualitative, netnographic study of Somby's Colour Your Past profiles in Facebook and Instagram and demonstrates how Somby and his followers reclaim photos of Sámi people produced during historical encounters with non-Sámi photographers. Drawing on Hirsch's (2008, 2012) concept affiliative postmemory, the analysis examines how historical information and affective responses becomes interwoven in reparative readings of colonial photos.

This article presents a conceptual and methodological framework that focuses on the interactivity, creativity, and variability of Holocaust images in digital media. Our argument unfolds in three stages. First, we introduce the concept of playful images: historical images that undergo recontextualisation, serving memetic, personal, and interactive engagements in and by digital media. Secondly, drawing on pivotal scholarship in digital methods, anthropology, sociology, and visual analysis, we identify a lacuna in contemporary methodologies and provide a rationale for an innovative approach to visual memory analysis in digital media that considers both digital media affordances and the appropriation of visual and historical materials in digital media. For that purpose, we thirdly outline a visual walkthrough method (VWM), a pragmatic performance of our approach tailored for analysing interactive digital experiences featuring playful images. By examining the playful appropriation of historical images in the video game Call of Duty: WWII (2017), we demonstrate how the interactive experience of playful images can be analysed with the help of the VWM. We conclude by discussing the position of our proposed conceptual and methodological framework within media and memory studies in the digital age.