Thu 7 Jun, 11:00-12:30
Session 30: Interface and User Perspective
Human-Centered Analysis and Visualization Tools for the Blogosphere
Xavier Llorà, Noriko Imafuji Yasui, Michael Welge, David E. Goldberg
Multilevel Displays and Document Blueprints: Dynamic Browsing Using XML Structures and Text Features
Stéfan Sinclair, Stan Ruecker
The Digital Museum in the Life of the User
Paul F. Marty
[final panel! off to the airport]
N. Yasui discussed blogs as human-centric: treat them as a conversation, with the relevant social aspects. What is hot, and can we identify bloggers’ expertise? Snakes on a Plane is the first film known to incorporate material from bloggers, even at the production stage. Can one take advantage of social networks to predict events and scenarios (e.g., next big mobile phone model)—”chance discovery”? [Seems to mean discovering chances, that is, opportunities, by chance. Talk v. hard to follow or v. obvious, not sure which. Parts of the talk involve a mathematical analysis of sentences for key concepts, equation and all, in terms of how often and where keywords are used. But—isn’t that kind of reductive? Not aided by the moment when the presenter began reading off the PowerPoint slides directly, or the moment when she seemed to be reading too-small handwriting from one of her pages.] There exists something called ISNP, Identifying Self/Non-self Post, to create predictive models of posts: remove stopwords [e.g., “a” and “the”—words that tend to crash large searches because they’re relatively meaningless and occur very frequently], then turn a post into a set of vectors for further analysis. [Halting note-taking now.]
S. Ruecker’s introduction noted that their focus is different ways to navigate XML-encoded texts. [Parts of this were presented at the TEI Members Meeting last fall; notes will be scattered. Also, after two days of note-taking I’m losing focus.] He and S. Sinclair have created an XPath wizard they call XPathFinder, which turns out to be more: one can learn about a document’s structure but also “read” the text. They also discussed semantic encoding that’d feed back into search results within a large, structured document, as shown in the Orlando Project, which has something similar to what they’re devising. Then Sinclair discussed HyperPo, currently in alpha, which indexes XML elements in a document, lets one click them one by one, and highlights the corresponding spans.
P. Marty (Spurlock Museum) noted that audience members habituated to wireless access are more demanding: how people interact with digital museum resources is changing as well because they’re aware of greater possibilities, even if not all venues and collections can support specific expectations. (Something might not be part of a particular collection.) Marty shared a variety of sites and tools [didn’t keep up]; one problem is that museums are creating systems but not studying their use carefully. One study suggests that people create bookmark collections on museum sites but never visit them again. 🙂 Perhaps creating such a list is enough satisfaction? Also, if one can access a collection online, will the person still visit the museum in person? A site serves as advertisement as well, yet it’s an important question about perceived obsolescence. Instead, ask perhaps what role these resources play in users’—visitors’—lives. Marty has been investigating how websites can build stronger relationships with visitors before/during/after museum visits. (One way, so far: take a photo as someone enters the museum, put it on the site, and they’ll return to create a better photo!)