[Patina] Re: questions about the field trial

Wed Mar 9 12:33:41 GMT 2011

Thanks Angeliki, this answers in large part the question in my previous
email!

> I agree with Tom that for us two it's easier and more feasible in short time to gather 3-4 PhD students from pottery and osteoarchaeology and have an informal discussion with them, concerning their potential involvement to the project. However, I think that PhD students have completely different research projects and pragmatically we can't easily engage them in this intervention (where there is a need for different people to comment on the same artefacts). 
I see your point, however, I think it would still be good to interview
them as master alumni, to get a sense of the processes that take place
during the final project.
I also think that it would still make sense to see if we can somehow
work with PhD students -- for example, do they use shared references? Or
could they act as experts for the second part of the study? (the one in
the usability lab..)

> I see more potential in involving the masters' students, where collaboration in the learning process is something that anyway happens and although they look at different assemblages they would still ask their mate about what they think. 
Sounds good.

> I know from Emilie (PhD in pottery) that this year's pottery masters does not have many people and 2 of them are part time so they are not around. Osteoarchaeology masters' studentes  seem to be more and the nature of their work in the labs aligns better with this intervention. 
This is very valuable information! Thanks!
Are there any other ceramic master students? Or do you use "pottery" and
"ceramics" in an interchangeable way?
(this is a dumb question, not a polemic one!)

> Practically, I think Graeme should speak to Jo Sofaer who teaches osteoarchaeology and by the way is really cool. We could also speak to Elli Williams as Tom suggests (PhD in osteo) to tell us if she would like to be involved. Her experience since she's done the masters as well could be very helpful and we could talk about organising a brief meeting with the masters to launch the intervention.
> Any time next week is good for me as well so if Graeme agrees we could start setting this up!
Excellent. If this could happen early enough for it to go on the wiki by
Wednesday it would be even better.
Any chance of meeting them Thursday?

Given the "shortage" of ceramic master students, I am wondering whether
it still makes sense to interview osteo PhD students. Probably yes, as
we will still learn from them.

Enrico

> Cheers,
> A    
>
> Angeliki Chrysanthi
> PhD candidate
> Archaeological Computing Research Group
> University of Southampton
> Avenue Campus
> SO17 1BF
> ________________________________________
> 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 9:46 AM
> 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 <<mailto:ec at ecs.soton.ac.uk>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/> 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://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ec
>
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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