Comments on: Patchwork Prototyping a Collections Dashboard

By: Liste non exhaustive des thématiques abordées lors des THATCamp | ThatCamp Paris 2010

Tue, 04 May 2010 07:51:58 +0000

[...] http://thatcamp.org/2009/patchwork-prototyping-a-collections-dashboard/ [...]

By: Sterling Fluharty

Sterling Fluharty — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:01:49 +0000

I agree that ontologies can be time consuming. Maybe what would work best is an experiment in crowdsourcing, where participants in a session have five to ten minutes to work out an ontology for the digital humanities. This could at least raise awareness about the value and challenge of creating ontologies.

You can find some of my thoughts on how Google has affected research here:
http://cliomachine.org/wordpress/?p=65

I think young researchers who grew up on Google have lost some of the skills acquired by previous generations of researchers. Our concepts and measurements of relevant search results has also been watered down as Google’s influence has increased, in my opinion.

By: Musebrarian

Musebrarian — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 03:46:06 +0000

@Patrick: I think there are also new possibilities that open up when we start having large quantities of item-level metadata around for collections which were never described at that level of granularity before. When collections are described at higher levels, there is a certain amount of purposeful wandering that’s necessary to get the lay of the land.

I also think there is something very human-scale about working with certain kinds of physical collections (even for large archives, we still talk about “linear feet” of materials – a very human-scale measurement). But digital collections are less tangible (measurements often rely on comparison to physical collections – how many times is the Library of Congress invoked as a yardstick for the capacity of some new digital medium?). I see a collection dashboard as a way of quickly and easily grasping the the quantifiable features of a collection on a more human scale.

By: Musebrarian

Musebrarian — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:40:30 +0000

@Sterling: I think you’re right about a need to explore the ontologies (both explicit and implicit) that are currently used to describe collections (and I’m sure Mark M. might have a few things to say about EAD), but at the same time that might be too distracting for THATCamp. At least personally I’d me more interested in exploring some grounded hunches that contours matter.

Do you think that Google’s precision is de-skilling researchers or just obscuring things which are relevant (but do not have a high page-rank?)

By: patrickmj

patrickmj — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:46:01 +0000

Very interesting….it might be related to the transformation from info being hard to dig up to info being all too easy to dig up. When it was hard to dig up, one had to cast a wide net and focus in from there–a process that necessarily revealed those contours. With info being easy to dig up, there’s more need for filtering right off the bat, which immediately obscures the contours?

By: Sterling Fluharty

Sterling Fluharty — Thu, 28 May 2009 06:33:49 +0000

This sounds like a fascinating topic. We could have a pretty interesting discussion of how information gets encoded, represented, and recognized in finding aids for archival and manuscript collections. I think you raise an interesting question of how aggregation impacts search techniques. Your exploration of scale is on the right track, in my estimation. What might be missing from your model, though, is an exploration of the ontologies necessary for making the most sense of finding aids. In fact, I am of the opinion that in this era of Google-influenced keyword searching, researchers have actually gotten better at finding sources that exactly match their topic and worse at uncovering sources that are semantically related to their topic. We could talk about whether this is the case and what the remedy might be.