Another cross-posting from the IMLS DCC Project Blog

I recently attended the Museums & the Web 2009 conference in Indianapolis, IN. Prof. Mike Twidale and I were there to do a live patchwork prototyping demo of the IMLS DCC Collection Dashboard concept. We had a great crowd of attendees in our booth who provided us with lots of great ideas for next steps (more on that, and a similar demo we did at HASTAC III later). But I also participated in several “unconference” conversations about the semantic web and open/linked data.

At the moment, information from the IMLS DCC is only available via the website and via our OAI-PMH data providers (one for collection-level records, and another for item-level records). While these are great for sharing records between repositories, they don’t necessarily make the information that we have accessible to cool web services like Yahoo! Pipes. Mia Ridge, at the Science Museum in London (and keeper of the Museum API wiki) issued a challenge for us to DO ONE THING before April was over. So here’s my attempt at DOING ONE THING with IMLS DCC. (and is admittedly just a baby step).

One of the services I learned about at MW2009 is Dapper, a tool that will screenscrape HTML pages to produce various kinds of output that you can share with APIs (application program interfaces). Dapper fits nicely within our Patchwork Prototyping toolbox, as it lets us play with some IMLS DCC data in ways that we couldn’t before and without having to actually build an IMLS DCC API first. One of the desirables that came up in both our MW2009 and HASTAC demonstrations was being able to see IMLS DCC collections on a map. So here we go…

First I screenscraped the list of IMLS DCC Collections By Title page. Dapper then allowed me to create:

• an RSS feed
• an Atom feed and
• a JSON feed

I took the Atom feed and passed it to the location extractor in Yahoo! Pipes to generate a map.

This is just a first baby step towards building other widgets for a collections dashboard! It needs some work (only a certain number of collections will appear on the map at any one time – you need to browse through the list to see more collections), but the idea behind the DO ONE THING challenge was to take some simple steps to build momentum.

A special thanks to colleague Piotr Adamczyck and his MuseumPipes blog for inspiration!

Ooops….after the iSchools 2009 conference, I updated a page on my website that contained my poster “Modelling CDWA Lite as an OWL-DL Ontology” but never posted anything here at Inherent Vice.  You can also download the full poster from the IDEALS repository.

I’ve also just posted the beta version of the OWL file on my website as well. I do this with some trepidation, since this is probably the first full OWL model that I’ve created from top to bottom. As I note in the paper, the current structure of the CDWA Lite XML schema forces ontology developers to make some choices about how certain parts of the schema are modelled in an ontology.

This was a useful learning exercise, but I’m not sure if I will take this particular OWL model forward. I had intentionally avoided using the CIDOC-CRM and the improvements suggested by the MuseumDAT project. CDWA and CDWA Lite have enough of a toehold here in the United States and had impacted other influential standards such as the VRACore and Cataloging Cultural Objects. I felt that it deserved a fair shake to stand on its own. But some of the problems I encountered in trying to create an OWL model suggest that modeling CDWA using CRM would be a worthwhile next step.

If you’re working on a similar project I would be interested in hearing from you and would appreciate any comments or feedback on the ontology itself.

Following on my earlier post, here is the final version of my “work in progress” poster.   I thought the session tonght went quite well, with interest from a number of different directions.  As a “work in progress” I’d still welcome comments and feedback on what’s presented here.

At the moment the connection between grounded theory approaches and ontologies seems strongest when discussing coding proceedures.  What I’m less sure about at this point is whether making ontologies helps build better theories about your data.   The one thing that makes me think this still might be processing is actually the CIDOC-CRM.   The more familiar with it that I became, the more I gained new insights about cultural heritage documentation.   I am hopeful that refinements on these approaches might lead to additional new ideas.

Thanks to everyone who provided some thoughtful comments on my last post about cultural heritage collections.  I’m still moving in the direction of defining my own universe of what I will consider as “cultural heritage” collections – but it may also mean that I have to craft a my own name for it.

But before I move on, I wanted to poke a little at an alternative to “cultural heritage” that has also been floated as a collective term for the kinds of institutions that I’m interested in — memory institutions.

Lorcan Dempsey described memory institutions as:

Archives, libraries and museums are memory institutions: they organise the European cultural and intellectual record. Their collections contain the memory of peoples, communities, institutions and individuals, the scientific and cultural heritage, and the products throughout time of our imagination, craft and learning. They join us to our ancestors and are our legacy to future generations. They are used by the child, the scholar, and the citizen, by the business person, the tourist and the learner. These in turn are creating the heritage of the future. Memory institutions contribute directly and indirectly to prosperity through support for learning, commerce, tourism, and personal fulfilment.

In the paper linked above, Dempsey doesn’t provide any sources for his ideas about memory institutions – I’m guessing that it may have been inspired by the discussions in scholarly communities about history, memory and culture and the emergence in the U.S. of digital projects like American Memory (followed by a series of state-level “memory” projects).  Like “cultural heritage” there are few clearly stated definitions for “memory institutions.” Birger Hjørland identifies “memory institution” as a metaphor for many kinds of institutions that create collections of materials, particularly cultural heritage materials.   Both Dempsey and Hjørland suggest that the need for such a term is driven by an increasing focus on digital materials that is jostling traditional institutional definitions.

Like cultural heritage,  memory institution has been picked up by lots of other authors without much fuss about what it could or should mean.  I’m haven’t seen any obvious difference yet when one term is used over the other – or if they are even equivalent terms (or if a cultural heritage institution is a kind of memory institution, or vice versa).  Dempsey says that having the right word is a sign of maturity – the concurrent use of LAM, ALM, “cultural heritage” and “memory institutions” suggests that the community’s ideas about convergence are still fluid.

Culture vs. Memory

On my post about cultural heritage,  Jo and Shawn pointed out the dangers of trying to pin down definitions of culture – the deep scholarship that’s considered  that question; the socially bound understandings of culture, etc. etc. Talking about “memory institutions” might seem like a safe way to avoid these pitfalls, but it comes with a whole host of other problems.   As a metaphor “memory” conjures up our personal experience with memory – it’s what’s in our head, it maybe short or long-term, you might have a better memory than me (highly possible).  What is harder to understand is how memory works on a  collective level.  (see also Hjørland on “exosomatic memory“).  We all carry some trace of individual memories that somehow add up to a larger schema that’s shared by other people – or at least would be recognized by other people as a shared memory.

The problems of understanding individual memory and collective memory seem to map nicely on top of the item-level metadata/collection-level metadata issues we’re exploring in the CIMR research group. Just as collective memory is more than just the sum of all our individual memories, collections are more than just the sum of all the items contained in them.  These distinctions could also be helpful when looking at the difference between collections created by an individual – say the Gardener Collection – verses those created by an institution (e.g. the Boston Museum of Fine Arts) or more broadly by a community of practice (a library, archive or museum).

Institutions vs. Collections

Since my last post, I’ve also been thinking about how to abstract away from collections as defined by their institutional/professional home – don’t library collections share some of the same essential features of archival collections when viewed though an archival lens? (or maybe that’s the question – what features do they share?) While there are many references to cultural heritage collections, there seem to be fewer mentions of memory collections – it’s almost always memory institutions.  (although, I admit, it is difficult to cut through the “American Memory Collection” noise in a organic Google search – relying on Google Scholar for this assertion).  Maybe it is a little easier for us to anthropomorphize an institution over a collection, whereas it is easier to see “cultural heritage” as a kind of collection as well as a kind of institution.

One thing this exploration hasn’t done is move me any closer to being able to point to a clearly understood domain.  Like cultural heritage, the domain of memory institutions also is fairly wide open for interpretation.  Perhaps by combining some of charateristics of entities identified as “cultural heritage” with those identified as “memory” a clearer picture will emerge.  But the way still seems clear to move ahead with defining a domain of my choosing (or as people are encouraging me to do, something more like a subset of that larger domain).

Last week, while I was pondering what field I was standing in, I realized that many of the blogs I subscribe to were not necessarily helping me think about that question. So I turned to my friend Mark, who I rely on to filter all things biblioblogosphere. Yes, that’s right, I’m the “friend” in question in this post.

First a few disclaimers- I sometimes get these odd feelings in my gut that suggests that something is missing, but I’m never quite sure it’s because they are really missing, or I’m just not looking in the right place, or asking the right questions. Generally I send out feelers to folks like Mark to see whether it is just lunch upsetting my stomach, or a legitimate hunch.

Secondly, I have to admit to throttling the bandwidth I’ve given to LIS blogs…too many blogs, too little time. Especially as the Museoblogosphere (ugh! that’s even worse than biblioblogospehere) has expanded. I’ve been splitting my time between LIS blogs, museum blogs, and digital humanities blogs. But from the responses to Mark’s post, it does seem that there is a dearth of LIS educator blogs.

Initially I was thinking about people who’s main employment was in a graduate program, but I’ll take Mark and other people’s posts that this definition needs to be expanded. We could rehash the theory vs. practice arguments, but I don’t think that will really get us anywhere fast. In fact I think this isn’t necessarily about the person and what their title is, but rather what the blog is about — namely the practice of being an educator and a researcher. I would extend that to include people who don’t claim to be “LIS,” but are in related disciplines that touch on issues we’re concerned about. (i.e. computer science, communications, anthropology, sociology, cognitive science, history of technology, etc., etc.). In the same vein, I’m also on a hunt for blogs in archival science, museum studies and museum informatics (to complete the LAM blog trifecta).

Here are some of the criteria that I am thinking about:

• informs the development of curriculum for library and information science
• discusses or informs what is expected from graduates of LIS programs
• discusses research methods and relevant literature
• how to be a better researcher, writer, presenter (blogger!)
• discusses high-level trends and research questions
• pulls in and comments on relevant research from “outside” the field
• offers new forms of scholarly communication and collaboration

I’m sure I’m missing some criteria, but will keep thinking about this as I look at the examples that have been posted in response to Mark’s post. The discussions about where Dorothea’s blog sits in all of this are interesting. One of the things that I find compelling about CavLec is that is that it’s not only about charming DSpace into behaving itself, but Dorothea’s reflections on LIS graduate education (and grad school in general – I had more than a few hard thinks about what I’m doing after reading “A Tale of Graduate School Burnout”). I’m sure I won’t be the first one to say we need more of what CavLec has to offer.

So why are LIS educator blogs few and far between? First, I haven’t heard of anyone who’s blog counted towards tenure and promotion. And when push comes to shove, you’re going to spend your time writing more articles rather than blogging. Academia runs on a great deal of whuffie and right now, blogs don’t contribute the way publications do (I’d be happy to be disabused of this notion). I’ve had conversations with faculty about finding the balance between talking about my research and the dangers of getting scooped by someone else who’s able to move faster than I can on a problem. These all seem like issues that are rooted in traditional practices of scholarly communication that are shifting and changing in unpredictable ways right now. This is also one of the reasons I’m watching several digital humanities blogs; to see how they are negotiating the channels and shoals of contemporary scholarship. Having some good models within LIS would be a welcome addition.

At the ASIS&T conference I sat in on the Bulletin editorial committee meeting (as ASIS&T student representative), where we discussed the recent move to publish the Bulletin online. I asked whether anyone had considered starting an ASIS&T blog, and while the idea has been floated, nothing seems to have happened on that front yet. Having helped start one collaborative blog, I wonder if something similar under the ASIS&T flag, would prime the pump for more LIS educators to take the plunge.

Of course, at the root of all of this, is me asking questions about what kind of educator and researcher I want to be and what role I want this blog to play in that development.

I’ve just finished reading Ray Oldenburg’s Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community.  I’ve used Oldenburg’s idea of “third places” in my research on Second Life – partly adopted from Constance Steinkuehler’s work in game studies.  Mostly I’ve looked at some brief outlines of what Third Places are and they seem to fit pretty well with things I see in Second Life.   Even Oldenburg’s characterizations of Third Places seems to fit.

But I find myself disappointed after reading the whole thing. It is  hmmm…conservative….in the original sense of that word.  There is a great litany of things we have lost or are losing.   But I’m not sure what exactly we’re hoping to preserve?  The pre-industrial tavern? Pre-suburbia hangouts? Snooker? Male space in the basement?  Or just “third places” in whatever form they come in

At the gut level I’m with him.  I’ve mostly avoided life in the suburbs; have preferred living in walkable communities; have practically lived in “classic coffeehouses” (Daily Grind, Brewed Awakenings,  Brew Ha-ha, Cafe Netherworld, St. Marks, Paris on the Platte {amazing how much metadata you can crosswalk with a pitcher of coffee in front of you…}, Espresso Royale, Cafe Kopi..just to name a few).  Of course much of this was possible after Oldenburg was writing, after downtown renovations, after tangible results of new urbanism.  But let’s agree that the vomitous sprawl that happened at the same time is evidence that I’m not average (statistically speaking).

I’m not convinced that Ray would be all that happy about applying his idea to virtual spaces, as apt a description as it may be on the surface.  They seem to fly in the face of the core plea for the conservation of the precious resource of public third places.   I can even picture him spewing coffee/beer/whiskey (with chaser)  at the suggestion of it.

I now feel compelled to read Bowling Alone.  And too look a little more closely at what I’m seeing.  Maybe it’s a nice shortcut to slot it into a pre-existing account of what’s happening, or maybe it’s just obscuring a better explanation.

Steinkuehler, C. & Williams, D. (2006). Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as “Third Places”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(4), article 1. (Link)

It’s been a while since I’ve put a substantial post here, because my spring schedule was rather crazy (3 classes, 4 conferences, 1 paper, 1 poster, lions, tigers, bears, oh my). Mostly I continue to write regular posts over at Musematic.. After a few weeks of tying off the loose threads of the spring semester I’m settling into a fairly quiet academic summer. I thought it would be helpful (for me anyway) to reprise what I did during coursework this spring.

Doctoral Research Methods

The second required class for the PhD program here at GSLIS, it is the jack-of-all-trades, master of none course on research methods. For those of you unfamiliar with LIS, the field draws from an extremely interdisciplinary set of approaches to conducing research. Some see this as a weakness because it makes us scattered and unfocused, but I find that its one of the attractive things about being here. I’m not sure where else I might find a home for myself otherwise.

The class confirmed my preference for qualitative methods (interviews, “thick description,” ethnography) over quantitative methods (surveys, bibliometrics, statistical analysis). As something of an outsider to the social sciences (ok, ok, history is considered a social science in some circles) the debates between the two camps are interesting to observe. It essentially boils down to an ontological commitment of how you want to view the world. I don’t see that one or the other provides a “better” or more true understanding of the world, instead each reveals a particular kind of understanding of the world.
Being a glutton for punishment I decided to look at mixed methods for my final paper. These combine qualitative and quantitative methods within a particular study. For example, conducting qualitative interviews that inform the development of a quantitative survey. This seems obvious, but there are debates about how to do it right and how to blend the right mixture of different methods to answer the questions at hand.  This seems like it would work best as a collaborative method.  Take a quant person and a qual person and set them after the same research questions.   Trying to be good at both just seems like too hard a task.
Design of Information Use Studies

This class is a more focused methods class, looking at how one designs studies to increase our understanding of how people use information. I continued to dig into the question of of how information gets used in museum settings by looking at research on information use in museums, such as Starr & Greisemer’s study of the Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (link) Of course if you are familiar with Paul Marty’s work, you will recognize this kind of research.

Again I’m trying to blend different kinds of methods here. Many information studies look at what people say about the here and now, maybe with a little background. However, distance choices made by our predecessors have framed the environments in which we are working and can influence what we see as our range of choices. I looked at a small body of literature on historic ethnography – which combines historic research methods with contemporary ethnographic interviews. Of course one of the problems here is that this sits squarely at the intersection of the the present and the past and raises some interesting questions.  We know that memory can be a slippery thing and historical methods can help to cross-check what informants report – if there is available documentation. Conversely, what gets documented may be the party line or an inaccurate or incomplete representation of events (I’m looking at you, grant report writers) and interviews can help reveal what went on between the lines.  Following on this theme I’ll be taking a course in the Anthropology department this fall called Anthropological Approaches to Memory.

I’m also extending this research method over the summer by doing a case study that combines historical research with interviews. More on that later.

Ontologies in the Humanities

This class continued my work with formal methods from applied philosophy. This semester extended our work on high-level approaches such as the FRBR and the CIDOC CRM and the harmonization of the two (FRBRoo).

Related to some of the work I was doing in Information Studies and an earlier Practicum I completed, I took a look at how collections are represented in the CRM. Currently the CRM treats collections as aggregates of physical objects and therefore they are modeled as physical things themselves. I’m exploring whether “collections” could be represented as conceptual objects that are related to a group of physical objects through the intentions of actors.   Extrinsic concepts are the glue that binds two or more objects together into a collection.  Further, it’s rarely any single well-defined concept, but rather a collection of concepts that together create a “collection.”  (if that’s not too circular).
Another intersection here is how these kinds of standards and ontologies get created in the first place. Often a group of smart and committed people sit down together and write them up. As a group they often have both a deep knowledge of the domain and a broad understanding of the context where it will be applied. On the whole then, standards usually come out looking like pretty good models of a particular area. What I find interesting is that I’ve come across very few papers that tie empirical studies of “ontologies” in the wild, with formalized expressions of them. I’m left with the question of whether formal ontologies can be improved through the application of quantitative or qualitative research methods.   At the same time qualitative data often gets marked up using a coding system (ala Strauss and Corbin).  I’m interested to see if this is a two way street – can formal methods inform the construction of qualitative coding systems? There’s a lot of literature out there to traverse, so if you know of something in this area, send it along.

I’m hoping this idea can also inform the independent study mentioned above.  Stephen Asma’s  Stuffed Animals & Pickled Heads is a nice complement to this work, because he’s able to present the underlying philosophies (and ontologies) of natural history collections in an accessible form.
You’ll notice that I didn’t mention Second Life once in this post. That’s a whole other ball of prims that I’ll get caught up on in a future post.

The first issue of a new open-access journal Digital Humanities Quarterly is now online.

I’ll also be participating in the Digital Humanities Conference that is being held here in Champaign this summer.

I’m trying to think about good ways to talk about the differences I see among the different groups I’m floating between. This year alone I’ll attend VRA, DH2007, Museums & the Web, AAM, MCN. not to mention CHI and ASIS&T.

From where I stand this collection of conferences makes an immense amount of sense – but I’m not sure its obvious to everyone who attends any one of them. I was very interested to note who I knew from other places at VRA, who I’ll likely run into again. Other things have kept me from going any further with some of my social network analysis experiments to look at the ties between these different communities. What makes each of them unique? Where do the communities overlap – and is that overlap significant enough that some sort of metaConference could be organized out of it? The Digital Libraries, Archives and Museums Visual Humanities Conference! All sorts of interesting problems there, from how each group traditionally organizes the conference to what the content is. Hmmm…

Papers are out for Museums & the Web 2007, including:

Urban, R., Marty, P., & Twidale, M. (2007). A Second Life for Your Museum: 3D Multi-User Virtual Environments and Museums. In J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds.). Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, published March 31, 2007 at http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/urban/urban.html

I’m in Kansas City all week for the Visual Resources Association Conference, but look forward to getting back next week and reading the posted papers.

Yesterday I tried to login to Second Life from home on my iBook to join a meeting of “SL Archivists” to find out what they were up to. I was able to teleport to the meeting for a few seconds before the SL client crashed horrifically – again. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Today I went out and acquired a new graphics card for my PC (which had taken up residence in the back of my closet). When I first started exploring SL in 2005, it had the guts needed to login. Sometime since August 2006 LL must have bumped up the requirements, making the geForce2 card insufficient. Ka-ching – $64 bucks later and I’m cruising around Second Life like a native instead of a gangly teenager. For reference:

Dell 8100 Dimension
1.28 Ghz Pentium 4
384 Mb RAM (yes, weird, but have you tried to by VRam lately?)
Windows XP Home
and a new EVGA e-GeForce 6200 LE

These are just above the minimum requirements to run Second Life on a PC. Performance so far has been great.

I find it disappointing and a little disturbing that my 6yr old PC can run Second Life (with a little bump in the graphics) better than my 1yr old iBook. Granted, it was a bare bones model that my new PhD student budget could afford but I think it raises questions about how easily Sl can be adopted for classroom teaching environments. The GSLIS LEEP distance program has tried to keep requirments minimal so the greatest number of students can participate. If SL were mandated for classes, some students would be left out in the virutal cold.

There are some who will argue that if your computer doesn’t support SL’s requirements then you should “go play somewhere else.” I think there are few educators, public libraries or museums who can afford to adopt this attitude. We have worked hard to make our websites accessible, to provide alternative access points when a user can’t support fancy content (e.g. Flash) and want as many people as possible to enjoy what we build with our small budgets. (and in many cases state or federal grant funding would demand accessible content).

I raise this issue not to discourage people from exploring Second Life, I do beleive that those who do will be ahead of the curve. However, I think some of our excitement about the possibilities needs to be tempered by the barriers to entry. And I think this is something that Linden Labs needs to consider if it really wants to capture the education market. I’m guessing that we are a minority of current users and may only generate a small amount of hard cash. But to fulfill the possibilities that many foresee, SL will eventually need to stabilize and find ways to lower technical barriers to entry on both platforms. I haven’t seen any news since LL open-sourced the client, but a more efficient OS X client would be welcome here.

Anyway, Aeth should me making more frequent appearances in-world now that he can do so from the comforts of home.