Data plans
Photos by Kimberly Coffin and Patrick Campbell
When Josie Mahoney’s best friend died in high school, his parents asked for her help with
heir son’s social media.
Of course, she said yes, but she didn’t know where to start. Should they delete his account, losing access to the photos he posted and was tagged in? Or archive it as a digital memorial?
“It was distressing,” said Mahoney (InfoSci’25). “I think a clinic would’ve been really great because at least there’s someone to talk to who knows what they’re doing.”
Now she’s one of those people: In her senior year, she joined CMDI’s Digital Legacy Clinic, led by Jed Brubaker, an associate professor of information science.
“The clinic is something you can’t bottle—there’s an energy there,” she said. “It’s the coolest class I’ve been a part of because of how it prepares us for the real world.”
Part of that is how the course is structured. Brubaker builds in collaborative, project-based assignments that mimic the workplaces Mahoney and her classmates will graduate into. But it also comes from the market need for a solution to what happens to our data when we die.
As an academic research collaborator at Facebook, Brubaker helped develop the platform’s memorial account practices, but saw a much larger problem than just social media—photos, videos, text messages, bank accounts and so on. Through a National Science Foundation CAREER Grant, he created a pro-bono, law school-style clinic to help people maintain their digital legacies.
“It felt like a really unique moment where my research, teaching missions and a desire to do public service perfectly overlapped,” he said.
‘Pre-mortem’ support
Many clients come to the Digital Legacy Clinic in search of what students call “pre-mortem” support—getting a handle on what to do with their data now, so their families don’t have as much stress later.
I appreciated the students’ compassion and that they’re thinking about ways to mitigate the overwhelm.”
Corinna Robbins
That was the case with Corinna Robbins.
“I wonder what will happen to all the digital detritus that feels meaningful to us, and I wonder how my family will handle mine, or how I should handle my parents’,” Robbins said. “My son is 16 right now. He may not be interested in my inner life at this moment, but I bet one
day he will be.”
Unlike her mother, who had a drawer or two full of family photos, Robbins said she had thousands of unorganized photos on about 25 hard drives. That alone felt daunting, but equally disappointing was losing a blog she kept as a young adult, filled with personal essays and photography.
With help from the students, she learned about different cloud solutions to organize her photo collection, as well as the Wayback Machine, an online archive where she was able to recover most of her blog.
“It was lovely to be reconnected with those artifacts of my younger, former self,” Robbins said. “I appreciated the students’ compassion and that they’re thinking about ways to mitigate the overwhelm.”
Students in the Digital Legacy Clinic provide client support while researching how different platforms treat user data after death.
‘A measly number’
Part of the clinic’s effort is dedicated to fieldwork, in which students review platforms’ policies for specifics on user accounts and data after death. They’ve found that only 13% of platforms offer functional support, “a measly number for something that will happen to 100% of us,” Brubaker said.
The rest of their time is spent on client cases and building out the clinic’s functionality. Jack Manning (CTD’24), an information science master’s student, built a chatbot to push students’ boundaries, ensuring they encounter a range of situations and build their confidence for working with clients who may be grieving.
“These are undergraduate students, not mental health professionals,” he said. “And there’s potential for harm in those sensitive communications.”
Manning, like Mahoney, joined the clinic in the fall and repeated the class last spring. While the first semester was spent developing the framework and assessing clients’ needs, the second focused on creating a knowledge base and onboarding system—like the chatbot—to benefit future students.
As part of her portfolio project last fall, Mahoney focused on leadership and outreach—so on top of helping clients, she also developed a mini knowledge base with resources to train future students to be sensitive in working with the public.
“Now I can say I was a team leader, a project manager and in charge of the timeline and what we were doing,” she said.
Students said that real-world emphasis shows up in other ways, too.
“I’ve learned how to work with people on different teams and bounce ideas off each other,” said Oliver Kochenderfer (InfoSci’25). “I’ve gotten so much teamwork experience, and it’s been cool to have a teacher who acts as a manager guiding us toward one big goal.”
Brubaker said it’s important to remember that although college is a time of exploration and experience, one of its main responsibilities is preparing students for life after graduation.
“I hope the clinic remains a place that has a public impact while also being a place for both my students and me to learn,” he said. “I love taking humanistic or social science issues and thinking about how to implement that in the code. We’re human-touch first. More than a solution, people need to be heard.”
Hannah Stewart graduated from CMDI in 2019 with a degree in communication. She covers student news for the college.
Photographer Kimberly Coffin graduated from CMDI in 2018 with degrees in media production and strategic communication.