[Patina] Re: questions about the field trial

[Enrico Costanza]

Hello.

> 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?
>
It depends.

If it's more of an exercise, where we ask them to do a task that is
relatively unrelated to their work, then it cannot be more than 1 or 2
hours (including the time to explain them and debrief them).

If it's something that integrates more directly in their work, and
ideally it does not impact much on their time, perhaps they could try to
use the system as a tool for their activity over a longer period, such
as a week? This would not be continuous obviously. The idea would be to
ask them to use our system, at least for a week, to take their notes,
rather than using what they normally use (e.g. their notebook?). After
(or even during) this period, we would interview, to ask them how it
went, and if they would like to continue using the system or revert to
their normal tools.. The interviews will be informed by log data that we
automatically collect, and perhaps we can also observe them while they
work (Tom?).
This second option would be really ideal -- do you think there's any
chance it could work? Perhaps on a small group of students?
We could advertise it to the entire cohort and ask for volunteers..

> 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?
>
Not sure I understand here, what do you mean?

What I have in mind is that the second part, the lab study, would be
more of an exercise, where participants should be archaeologists, but
may not necessarily work on the specific topics that the data is about..
>
> Certainly if supervisors or other staff had access as part of the process.
>
Do you mean that it would be good to give access to them or not? (so
that students can use it "more freely"?)

> 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.
>
Useful information, thanks!

> 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 potential problem is that asking them to annotate collections would
be "extra work" that does not really fit in their normal flow -- right?

I agree that it would be good to have some key collections digitized,
for possible re-use. Moreover, doing both structured and unstructured
options would be good to have redundancy, and increase the chances of
getting some useful data. Maybe we could work with 2 groups. Ask one
group to annotate a collection (it would have been ideal if this could
have been part of a class exercise, like we saw), and another group to
use the system in their normal work flow.
The downside is that we normally should compensate (=pay) subjects for
their participation in a study. This is not strictly necessary, and I
guess it should be discussed.

> 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.
>
Are these reference collections or new finds?

> 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.
>
Is this material related to projects students work on?
Could either Leif or Luc (if he has that information already) post this
info on the wiki (e.g. the sparql endpoint)? So that Mike J could
perhaps start to have a look at it?

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

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/patina/attachments/20110305/4d98b279/attachment.html