Integral Honors Program Thesis Defense: Erin Connolly

Erin Connolly will present her Integral Honors Thesis Defense: “Telling Through Time: Artifacts of Us and the Fragments We Carry”

Familial objects serve as powerful anchors for memory, identity, and intergenerational connection, yet the narratives attached to them are often lost due to gatekeeping, technical hesitancy, and inaccessible preservation tools. This thesis examines how human-centered digital archiving can support the preservation and transmission of object-based family histories. Drawing on human–computer interaction (HCI), archival theory, and memory studies, the research highlights metadata as a critical bridge between objects and lived experience.

Using ethnographic interviews analyzed through grounded theory and a participatory design process, this study identifies key barriers to preservation and translates them into actionable design requirements. Findings show that emotional attachment, provenance, and relational context drive preservation, while lack of motivation and technical confidence inhibit it. The thesis contributes an inductive analysis of familial archiving practices and proposes a prototype for a collaborative, multimodal