Obit Research

We have discovered that in England, people love their obituaries. Obits have long been large sources of traffic and readership for English newspapers. In contrast to the American style, obits originating in England can be saucy and/or sarcastic, depending on the author’s mood. The tone does not always have to be totally sympathetic or even kind, and the principles of detailed storytelling are usually prioritized higher than simply stating the facts and important events of a person’s life. Take for example the beginning of this obituary of Gavin Hodge, a celebrity hair dresser:

Gavin Hodge, who has died aged 65, was one of the first celebrity hairdressers, and became known as much for his sexual conquests as for his skills with the scissors; his era was the 1960s and 1970s, when the crimper emerged from the shadows of the salon to become a sought-after man about town.

Also, here is an excerpt from the an obit written for British Manjor-General Ken Perkins:

There were some who thought that Perkins might have climbed higher were it not for his uncompromising nature: he was never afraid to go out on a limb or to ruffle feathers by questioning the official line.

Is this more honest style of obit reporting beneficial?

ED: Also take a look at Ming’s fine post on world obituaries, which includes a section about those in Britain.

Besides what we’ve already discussed on this blog in terms of Facebook “memorializing” the profiles of deceased users, there’s another way that the dead are being remembered on the social network — with public groups set up to remember a particular individual.

This differs from the memorialized profile in two key ways.  First, these groups are impromptu, created by friends or loved ones after the individual has passed away, as a means of socializing with others that may have known the deceased.

Second, and I think more important, is that they are generally publicly accessible, whereas memorialized profiles are only accessible to those that were previously confirmed friends on Facebook.

What this public accessibility means is that people who may only have just joined Facebook, or old friends that may have lost touch can participate in the memorials.  These users would be locked out of the memorialized profile page, which, in a very real way, defeats the purpose of calling it a “memorial” at all.

Here’s one example of a Facebook group created as a memorial to a deceased user:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=175462972576&v=wall

This past week the eight of use conducted paper prototyping and tested our ideas for Legacy’s new webpage on a few people. We drew out paper versions of the page and all the sections we want to include, and several of us marched to nearby coffee shops and academic buildings to interview people in our audience age group.

One of the main criticisms that stood out was regarding our concept of an editorial page, a potential section on Legacy.com that will include articles and editorials by a staff journalist, links to Associated Press obituaries, links to interesting obituaries from other newspapers like the New York Times and perhaps a section on who died on this day in history. It would involve mostly obituaries of prominent people, but not necessarily.

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ALINA (SEYMOUR FROMER):

A New York Times obituary of Seymour Fromer, a collector of one of the largest collections of Judaica in North America, including archives documenting the history of Jews in the American West. Kind of interesting.

IAN (CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS):

My favorite obits this week were of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.  He was terribly influential as a thinker, and leading proponent of structuralism.  Practically every high-quality obituary page ran something on him, and this is just one sample from the Guardian.

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My favorite obituary of this week was the one about Mr. Qian Xuesen’s death. As one of the most respectable scientists in China and probably in the world, I feel that his death was a great loss to China and human history. Mr. Qian lived a very dramatic life. He was educated in the States, but was also arrested for a reason that has never been proved. Finally, he went back to China and started to dedicate to China’s aviation industry.

I was really sad when I heard of his death and I read almost every obituary in all of the major newspapers.

• AP: Father of China’s Space Tech Program Dies at 98
• WSJ: Trained in the U.S., Scientist Became China’s ‘Rocket King’
• NYT: Qian Xuesen, Father of China’s Space Program, Dies at 98
• LA Times: Qian Xuesen dies at 98; rocket scientist helped establish Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• New Yorker: The Two Lives of Qian Xuesen
• Chicago Tribune: Father of Chinese missile programs
• Xinhua: China’s “father of space technology” dies at 98

Among all of them, I like the New York Times one and the Wall Street Journal one more than the others, because I found they provided more interesting detail information about Mr. Qian’s life both in the States and in China.

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(John Thadeus Delane, courtesy of Wikipedia commons)

Kate and I had a brief, affable back and forth during discussion last week about the historical tone of obituaries — i.e., “Was the content presented directly and concisely or expressively and at length?”

Research has shown that obits have been on a creative upswing since their inception at the dawn of the printing press, beginning as short [death] notices and transforming into storytelling tools a few hundred years afterward.  Pinning down where and when this revolution took place was a much easier task than expected, and there was one particular man to thank.

A Google Archive search of the obituary’s history, though surely imperfect and hardly scientific, reveals a timeline increasingly populated by the mid- to late-1800s.  Per a bit of research, there was a name in journalism that, not coincidentally, was prevalent in regards to obit writing during that period: John Thadeus Delane, editor of The Times of London from 1841-77.

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Alina beat me to the punch in pointing out the rather broad coverage devoted to the new Facebook “recommend” functionality and the deceased.

According the The Guardian, it seems that Facebook actually has a mechanism for dealing with profiles of the dead.

“‘When someone leaves us, they don’t leave our memories or our social network. To reflect that reality, we created the idea of ‘memorialised’ profiles as a place where people can save and share their memories of those who’ve passed,’ explained Max Kelly, Facebook head of security, on the company’s blog.

But what does it mean, that an account gets ‘memorialised’? The contact information and status updates are removed, and the profile is set private. No one can log into it any more. Only Facebook friends can locate the profile via search and leave posts on the wall for remembrance.“

Apparently, this mechanism isn’t well known,  or perhaps well implemented, since Facebook is still recommending that people re-connect with dead friends.

Of course, there is a simple solution to the problem of … expired … accounts on social media networks.

If you plan to have birth date data in a user’s profile, build in a data structure that allows you to note the death date as well, and ensure there is a mechanism for a friend or family member to update the account with death information.  Furthermore, integrate the idea that a user might pass away from the beginning of the design process.

It also might be beneficial to check new entries to the Social Security Death Index or a similar publicly query-able data source to get information on those who have died that may have been member of the site.  Sure, that adds administrative overhead, but if you are saving your clients even a little bit of grief in the long run, it’s a worthwhile investment of resources, I think.

Should this be standard operating procedure for all social media sites?  Feel free to discuss the idea in the comments.

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.

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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.

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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.

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