VirtualDayz has a number of posts on memory, new media, and memory and new media make it a blog to keep an eye on. The focus is on personal memory and narrative rather than the cognitive and social, which are my particular interests, but it's difficult to build strong walls in memory studies. Personal memory is always socially constructed and social is always, in some ways, personal. And the cognitive is never far away no matter what type of memory you're considering.

For instance, this entry on Annette Kuhn's Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, which is summarized as:

I've been reading Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, a memoir by British film scholar Annette Kuhn (1995/2002). A blend of cultural criticism and cultural production that engages both the psychic and the social, the hybrid text brings together a series of autobiographical case histories that use private and public images from Kuhn's past as prompts for “memory work,” which Kuhn defines as “a method and a practice of unearthing and making public untold stories” (9-10). In a manner reminiscent of Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Kuhn reflects on her family album, as well as on news photographs and film scenes, to “unravel the connections between memory, its traces, and the stories we tell about the past, especially-though not exclusively-about the past of living memory” and in the process to reveal “the collective nature of the activity of remembering” (Kuhn, 4, 6).

In part, Kuhn is interested in "how images make meaning," and we read images both as individuals and as members of a social group/mnemonic community.

I talk more about the blog and that post in particular over at Machina Memorialis.

Annette Kuhn | autobiographical memory | memory | social memory