Abstract:
Everyday experiences are the experiences available to shape developmental change.
Remarkable advances in devices used to record infants’ and toddlers’ everyday
experiences, as well as in repositories to aggregate and share such recordings across
teams of theorists, have yielded a potential gold mine of insights to spur next-generation
theories of experience-dependent change. Making full use of these advances, however,
currently requires manual annotation. Manually annotating many hours of everyday life
is a dedicated pursuit requiring significant time and resources, and in many domains
is an endeavor currently lacking foundational facts to guide potentially consequential
implementation decisions. These realities make manual annotation a frequent barrier
to discoveries, as theorists instead opt for narrower scoped activities. Here, we
provide theorists with a framework for manually annotating many hours of everyday
life designed to reduce both theoretical and practical overwhelm. We share insights
based on our team’s recent adventures in the previously uncharted territory of everyday
music. We identify principles, and share implementation examples and tools, to help
theorists achieve scalable solutions to challenges that are especially fierce when
annotating extended timescales. These principles for quantifying everyday ecologies
will help theorists collectively maximize return on investment in databases of everyday
recordings and will enable a broad community of scholars—across institutions, skillsets,
experiences, and working environments—to make discoveries about the experiences
upon which development may depend.