[Patina] Re: questions about the field trial

[Earl G.P.]

Hi Enrico,

Answers/ comments below:

From: patina-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk [mailto:patina-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Enrico Costanza
Sent: 04 March 2011 19:32
To: Southampton-specific mailing list for PATINA project
Subject: [Patina] questions about the field trial

Hi Graeme, Angeliki and Tom,

Sorry to email you at this hour -- it's been a hectic day. I am trying to figure out few more details of intervention 3 and its deployment in view of the Monday meeting.

As we discussed on Thursday, the current idea is to have a field trial (here I mean in the Archaeology lab, which in HCI terms is still "field") where we have users gathering annotations using our system, and a more controlled lab study where we focus on the browsing or more general the "use" of this data. In the lab study, it would be great to have an exercise-like task, where we know that there is a "correct answer" -- this could be because we only show part of the data collected in the field trial, so that the other part would be the answer..

So we have 3 related questions:
1. who are the users for the field trial and for how long could they engage with the system?

The length of time is tricky. Clearly we can't have too much impact on their study time, whether or not they are paid for their time. How long do you think is necessary, or is this an impossible question to answer?

2. what kind of annotations could do they gather?

I think the on-going interpretation both of the specific objects and their place in wider narratives would be good, particularly as ideas change.

3. who could we get to look at this data later on? (this could be the same people as in 1)

I think 1. Other people looking at it would impact on the kind of data gathered wouldn't it? Certainly if supervisors or other staff had access as part of the process.

Are there students (UG? MA? PhD?) in Archaeology during the summer who we could involve?

Yes. MA and PhD definitely.


Are there classes? Are there projects? (e.g. master projects) If there are master projects, how are they typically organized? Individual? Group? How are topics assigned? How are students supervised?

No classes. Masters projects are individual generally. There may be some group activity if students are helping one another but this would be rare. Topics are chosen by students, through discussion with supervisors. Supervision is via regular meetings and occasional hands-on involvement via staff e.g. to assess developing methodology.


Regarding #2, should we get participants to annotate an existing and organized collection? That would give us more systematic data. Or shall we ask them to annotate the finds that they normally work on? That would be more realistic.

I would propose both. As you know from your visit there are some collections that are frequently used. The advantage of using these is that we could go back to the same collection next year potentially? I would also like to be able to see a less structured observation i.e. as you say where the finds are what the student is working on for their own project.

The more realistic option may be preferable, but how many objects would these students normally work on?

In osteological and ceramic terms there will be collections of hundreds of objects potentially.

If we do go for the more realistic option, we may need to pre-populate the system with some data, to make it more useful. Is there existing data in digital format that we could use? For example, are there available data sets in the CIDOC CRM format that Graeme mentioned in the past? ( http://hypermedia.research.glam.ac.uk/kos/CRM/ )

We have linked data for the ceramic material from Portus? Leif is already discussing access to this data with Luc's student so it might work well.

Happy to answer further questions! Cheers,

G


Thanks,
Enrico


--

Dr Enrico Costanza

Lecturer, Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group

School of Electronics and Computer Science

University of Southampton, UK, SO17 1BJ



http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ec

http://d-touch.org
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