In honor of Halloween, I would like to bring you a truly morbid post by pointing out two interesting trends in the realm of death this week.
First, TIME Magazine had an article this week, “What Happens to Your Facebook Profile After You Die”. Apparently if a user dies and the family can submit proof like an obituary, the profile can either be removed completely or converted into a memorial. The user then won’t show up in Facebook’s suggestions, and information like status updates won’t show up in Facebook’s news feed. This came out of complaints by users who were getting suggestions to reconnect with deceased users.
Read more…
ASHLEY (MARY BRILL):
I enjoyed this very local obituary in the Sacramento Bee about a 59-year-old community activist named Mary Brill. It’s a touching tribute to a woman who suffered multiple scelrosis, a brain tumor and other health ailments, yet remained a powerful and engaged advocate for local issues. It’s also interesting that the Sacramento Bee is not served by Legacy.com, that a fair number of people commented on the obituary, and that Ms. Brill was a single, unmarried woman.
ALINA (INDIRA GHANDI):
This is an old obit from 1984 of Indira Ghandi that was featured on the New York Times website for obits of people who died on this day in history. This obit of the Indian leader is not much like an obit at all. First of all it’s very long and it’s more like a long feature article with a headline and section breaks. I think this is a good example of the kind of reporting that can be done around people who have died, especially prominent ones.
Read more…
Our research team brainstormed about what has changed in the world of obituaries yesterday. One consensus was the obituaries of the past were mostly about the facts of death, but it’s more about the facts of life today.
It recalled something I read from the research readings. That article was “The Changing Presentation of Death in the Obituary, 1899-1999″, which roughly analyzes the changing concept of obituaries in history.
Read more…
For the past week, our obituary research team has been mocking up some designs of the future Legacy.com. Northwestern professor Jeremy Gilbert graciously shared his knowledge of paper prototyping and usability testing with us, and has been helping us through our initial designs.
Today we tested our tests on two generous NU undergraduate students and got some very valuable information that will help us when we begin our actual testing next week.
The most and possibly best feedback we received was on the homepage design. We have been working on two versions of the page; one with a lot of different information all laid out for the user, and another version with the features and services dispersed into different categories, separated by tabs.
Our research team was pretty evenly split on which design would be best, and I think it’s safe to say that a few more rounds of user testing will solidify which version will be most optimum.
There are definitely some word choices we need to work on in an effort to make search criteria and subject headings more clear to the user. For instance, we think the word newspaper is clearer to a user than the word publication, when they are searching for an obituary or death notice from a particular newspaper or publication. (Have I said newspaper and publication too much?)
But perhaps most importantly, on Halloween Eve, we have decided that we must have plenty of candy to offer to our testing subjects as an incentive/thank you. And we need to make sure that Jake doesn’t eat it all during the testing.
As our group works on designing and fleshing out ideas for an improved Legacy.com, we continue to discuss ways to supplement the standard obit with fabulous supporting content. Some thoughts involve using videos and audios when necessary, especially for instances when multimedia was an important part of the deceased person’s life.
For example, Vic Mizzy recently died. You might not recognize his name, but you certainly recognize two TV theme songs he wrote earlier in his life. Sure, The Addams Family and Green Acres stopped airing new episodes ages ago, but it’d be nice to be able to listen to those timeless jingles while reading Mizzy’s obituary. In our beginning prototypes, a legacy.com user would be able to accomplish this with a simple click of a mouse.
Also, why not have other professionals, besides journalists, written about a person’s life? Wouldn’t it be insightful to read a doctor’s point of view about a deceased pioneer in the medical profession?
(ED: Yes.)
As part of my obituary research I read an interesting study, “The Reporting of Grief”, by one newspaper of record for the U.S.: the New York Times.
The study seems to be more about articles about the grief process and grieving in general, rather than obituary writing, but I thought what the study said was interesting and telling. Here are some highlights:
- The study asks: Is grief socially constructed by the media?
- People, the study says, look to institutions to help them understand grief and give them instructions on how to grieve. The definitions provided by institutions are never all-inclusive, and leads to “disenfranchised grief.”
- The study says the media (and I would argue the larger American popular culture) present grief as an abnormal state of mind, something to be “cured” of.
- The study found that experts gave different, conflicting messages about grieving depending on the framing of reporters’ questions.
Also interesting is that during 2000-2006 articles equated handling one’s grief “well” with handling it quickly. The study ends by recommending that topics not be chosen/constructed with the aim of “curing” or “taming” an illness, because grief isn’t an illness, but a personal journey.
This past week I interviewed obituary writers in two different newspapers across the country, The Bradenton Herald in Bradenton, FL and the Greenville Sun in Greenville, TN. Both newspapers were mentioned in 2000-2001 by the Readership Institute as newspapers doing a good job providing obits to readers. I wanted to check what they are doing and how.
Read more…
MING AND IAN (HOWARD UNRUH):
(MING): The headline caught me in the first place. It seems that all the obituaries I’ve read before were talking about someone who either had achievement in a particular field or had a very interesting. meaningful life. But someone who killed 13 of his neighbors? Never. It’s more like reading a fiction story. When I was reading the details of the story, I could even picture the scene and it really terrified me. I was thinking that the military life this man experienced must have made him very scared, hurt or something. And. very ironically, after this, his life was all about sleeping and watching TV. His entire life literally left nothing but the massacre.
(IAN): I’m a sucker for a serial killer story. I think it comes from my love of horror movies. This guy, Howard Unruh, was a real-life monster, and never went to jail. He lived out his days confined in a hospital for the criminally insane after killing 13 of his neighbors for seemingly no reason at all.
Read more…
For this project, I’ve been reading this book—The World of Obituaries. One thing, if not more, that interested me a lot was the difference between American obituaries and obituaries in other cultural environments.
The first discussion was about the term “obituary”. The author says that some English-language newspapers reserve the term “obituary” for staff-written obituaries and use such terms as “death notices,” “death announcements,” and the like for family-written ones. But Arabic and Persian-language newspapers do not make such a linguistic distinction but restrict the obituary pages to the family-written type and consider staff-written obituaries to be news items published in other pages of the newspaper in accordance with the importance of the deceased. That means, when famous people like presidents or major figures die, their deaths were usually reported as a news item on the front page, whereas less prominent people get written up in other pages. But when I did the interviews with staff writers with American newspapers, they told me that no matter whether the person was well-known or just an “average” person, as long as his/her life story was interesting, they would definitely choose this person to do a news obituary rather than just to put a death notice somewhere.
Read more…
Throughout the last few weeks our team of obituary researchers has been conducting open-ended interviews with acquaintances who, we believe, fall outside of Legacy.com’s traditional audience demographic.
I had the enviable task of compiling all of these interviews, hoping to make some inferences on the general public’s opinions of obituaries. Our sample of interviewees comprises men and women, between the ages of 21 and 42, residing in locations from New York to Boise.
Read more…