[Patina] Re: questions about the field trial

Wed Mar 9 11:59:06 GMT 2011

I think Angeliki has pretty much answered this; in all likelihood the PhD students would be able to tell us about their specific usage of the lab but probably won't use much shared material or have much experience using the lab collaboratively. I agree that studying one specific domain would be much better, and would echo Angeliki again in that it might be best to talk to Jo Sofaer about approaching the master's students who use the osteology laboratory. If you agree I think I will still go ahead and approach the PhD students to meet us on Monday as I feel their views on this will be useful? Angeliki, it sounds like you have already discussed this with Emilie so I will leave it with you to approach her about Monday if that is ok?

Cheers, 
Tom.

-----Original Message-----
From: patina-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk [mailto:patina-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Chrysanthi A.
Sent: 09 March 2011 11:51
To: Southampton-specific mailing list for PATINA project
Subject: [Patina] Re: questions about the field trial

______________________________
From: patina-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk [patina-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Enrico Costanza [ec at ecs.soton.ac.uk]
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 11:47 AM
To: Southampton-specific mailing list for PATINA project
Subject: [Patina] Re: questions about the field trial

Thanks Tom!

I don't think there are many PhD students who study osteo-archaeology (bones),

>> just realised this! on one hand we have 5-6 PhD students in pottery and 1-2 in osteo. Bit it's the other way around for masters students! I would still suggest we go for the osteo masters team though and involving Elli and Jo as representatives of expertise (hierarchy etc)!

It's good that you are bringing this up -- do we have a preference or need to work on osteo-archaeology? Or can we do ceramics?

I think it may be better to focus on one domain, so that we can get a larger data set, rather than 2 small ones. However, does it matter which domain we focus on? Thoughts?

Enrico

so it may be the case that we want to approach masters students as well.

Cheers,

Tom.

From: patina-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk<mailto:patina-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk> [mailto:patina-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Enrico Costanza
Sent: 09 March 2011 09:46
To: Southampton-specific mailing list for PATINA project
Cc: Southampton-specific mailing list for PATINA project
Subject: [Patina] Re: questions about the field trial

Great!

Do you think it'd be possible to find PhD students who did their master here (doing a project of the kind that we want)?

Thanks,
Enrico

Sent from my phone, sorry about possible typos.

On 9 Mar 2011, at 09:31, "Frankland T." <tf4e10 at soton.ac.uk<mailto:tf4e10 at soton.ac.uk>> wrote:
Hi Enrico,

I think this sounds like a very good idea and valuable from my perspective as well, and I would therefore definitely want to include this in my analyses of the lab. From a personal point of view, I think access to PhD students would be quite easy for myself and Angeliki to arrange, however to chat with masters students (whom I know less well on a personal basis), it would be easier to go via Graeme and perhaps speak to their supervisor(s). All of those times you suggest are fine by me so I would wait to see if Angeliki and Graeme are free as well.

Cheers,

Tom.

From: patina-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk<mailto:patina-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk> [mailto:patina-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Enrico Costanza
Sent: 09 March 2011 08:51
To: Southampton-specific mailing list for PATINA project
Cc: Southampton-specific mailing list for PATINA project
Subject: [Patina] Re: questions about the field trial

Hello.

This is mostly for the Archeology team.

I would like to make progress on the trial/study organisation, ideally before next Wednesday, when the next wiki iteration is due. This is because I think that the organisation may influence the intervention design, given that essentially we are designing a "probe" -- as it kind-of emerged on Monday.

I would like to understand more about how master and doctoral students work, to try and figure out how (including for how long) to involve them in our trial without disrupting them to much, and what kind of data we are likely to capture.

What do you think would be the best way to do this? Have a chat (=interview) with some of them? Have a chat with some (1?) of their supervisors? Or is this something that you know already, so I could ask you directly?

I understand that we will not work with Graeme students because they do a different type of work, so do you already know who else we might work?

As Graeme seems to be very busy these days, is this something that Tom and Angeliki may push forward? Or do we need Graeme political leverage to contact people?

Tom, as you said you are interested in the ethnographic and qualitative research aspects of the project, do you want to treat this more formally and make it part of your deliverable?

I am available to meet or interview people, in order of preference:
Monday after 3
Thursday after 4 (and potentially until 6:30) Friday

Thanks,
Enrico

Sent from my phone, sorry about possible typos.

On 5 Mar 2011, at 12:17, Enrico Costanza <ec at ecs.soton.ac.uk<mailto:ec at ecs.soton.ac.uk>> wrote:
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
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--
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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