Digital experiences capture an increasingly large part of life, making them a preferred, if not required, method to describe and theorize about human behavior. Digital media also shape behavior by enabling people to switch between different content easily, and create unique threads of experiences that pass quickly through numerous information categories. Current methods of recording digital experiences provide only partial reconstructions of digital lives that weave – often within seconds – among multiple applications, locations, functions, and media. We describe an end-to-end system for capturing and analyzing the “screenome” of life in media, i.e., the record of individual experiences represented as a sequence of screens that people view and interact with over time. The system includes software that collects screenshots, extracts text and images, and allows searching of a screenshot database. We discuss how the system can be used to elaborate current theories about psychological processing of technology, and suggest new theoretical questions that are enabled by multiple timescale analyses. Capabilities of the system are highlighted with eight research examples that analyze screens from adults who have generated data within the system. We end with a discussion of future uses, limitations, theory, and privacy.

数字体验占据了生活中越来越大的一部分，使其成为描述人类行为和理论化人类行为的首选方法（如果不是必需的话）。数字媒体还使人们能够轻松地在不同内容之间切换，并创建快速传递众多信息类别的独特体验线索，从而塑造行为。当前记录数字体验的方法仅提供数字生活的部分重建，这些数字生活通常在几秒钟内编织在多个应用程序、位置、功能和媒体之间。我们描述了一个端到端系统，用于捕获和分析媒体生活的“屏幕组”，即个人经历的记录，表示为人们随着时间的推移查看和交互的一系列屏幕。该系统包括收集屏幕截图、提取文本和图像并允许搜索屏幕截图数据库的软件。我们讨论了如何使用该系统来阐述有关技术心理处理的当前理论，并提出通过多个时间尺度分析来实现的新理论问题。该系统的功能通过八个研究示例得到了强调，这些示例分析了在系统内生成数据的成年人的屏幕。我们最后讨论了未来的用途、限制、理论和隐私。