[Patina] Re: Intervention & study update + meeting call

[Frankland T.]

My comments are below. Following the PATINA meeting last week in London, I will label each of my comments in the form - Tom: as this makes it clear I am commenting, and I can understand that in a long chain of emails this might get confusing.

From: patina-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk [mailto:patina-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Enrico Costanza
Sent: 25 March 2011 14:51
To: Southampton-specific mailing list for PATINA project
Subject: [Patina] Intervention & study update + meeting call

Dear All,

A quick update after the additional conversation Tom and I had with Archaeology MA students and the meeting I had with Mike J regarding the integration of intervention 3 with the back-end.

We met 2 more students, one from Osteoarchaeology and one from Palaeolithic Archaeology. The main things we learned are:

 *   Master projects seem not to directly follow the kind of process we expected and discussed. In particular none of the two we met are going to use the labs on the Avenue Campus for their projects: one student (palaeo-) will do experiments with primates to study communication mechanisms, the other student has two options, either classify bones on a site in Hungary, or work with human bones in Portsmouth (it is unlikely these will be taken to Southampton).
 *   Students tend to keep notes from their UG and master projects for years. These are often not used, and just sit in a drawer. At least in one case the notes were added as an appendix to the submitted project report, however, this does not seem to be common practice: normally the notes are kept by the student and only the report is submitted. So we can use these notes as testing material.
Tom: The first point is difficult to confirm based on a meeting with just two masters students, but our meeting with the three PhDs prior to this seemed to confirm this as their masters work was also done for the main part remotely from Southampton.

Based on these two points, here are our (=Tom and me) thoughts: we should try and get available notes as soon as possible (Tom should be on the case), first of all to analyse them and then to enter them into our system. In this way we can completely decouple the "input" and "output" aspects of the study. Entering the pre-existing notes in batch can also help us validate/debug the basic functionality of the system.

Tom: I'm still currently trying to get hold of Kathryn Temple's dissertation, who is happy for us to use them. If Graeme or Angeliki could suggest to me any other places I might be able to find student notes I would be really grateful. Enrico, Graeme has suggested I raise your awareness of the Catahoyuk diaries as an example of pre-existing archaeological note taking http://www.catalhoyuk.com/database/catal/diarybrowse.asp and also the ARK database, http://www.lparchaeology.com/prescot/ which is a database where data is input whilst on site and includes the facility to annotate finds and data acquired. Neither of these are quite the same as what we are proposing but they are sufficiently similar in that there may be a bit of overlap and are worth being aware of.

So on one hand we will have an experiment where we compare finding information using our system to the use of the original notes and the original report based on the same notes. This will basically be an information retrieval task (there are studies around this topic, so I will try to look for specific references we can use). One question that still needs to be clarified, though, is what exactly to expect from this comparison (beyond obvious advantages of electronic systems). This strongly depends on the design of the "output side" of the system, on which I am still working. In general I hope that ideas from provenance can be integrated here (Luc, I am looking at the documentation on the opm website to get ideas..).

Tom: My feeling is the output is one significant aspect of the intervention which needs a bit more thought, and I also think this will become more even more important in later iterations of the note taking system, as we enable archaeologists to communicate outside the lab and between the lab and field.

We will still need to show that it is also possible to use the system to enter notes directly (rather than adding pre-existing ones), so we still need to run a "field" (=not usability lab) study. To add to the motivation for participants to use the system, it would be good to either have multiple users working around the same topic (so by using the system they learn about each other's work) or have the system  pre-populated with information that is relevant to the participants. The topics of the MA projects seem to be quite scattered, so we are still trying to figure out who else could take part in this -- perhaps we could do something related to Portus? We are planning to talk with Pina (a PhD student involved in Portus, Tom to arrange this meeting), with a PhD student (the only one) in osteoarchaeology (Angeliki should set up that meeting) and with the supervisor of Osteo-MA students (Graeme, Angeliki & Tom suggested that you arrange this meeting). I also just sent an email to Leif asking for more information about the digital data related to Portus.

Tom: I have emailed Pina and am still waiting a reply, as soon as I've heard I'll let you know.

>From the meeting with Mike J about the integration of intervention 3 and the ontology, it seems that the intervention and the ontology are quite aligned, thanks also to recent discussion between Mike and Luc. Open issues (on which I need to work) include:

 *   finalizing the input side of the interface, including deleting notes and handling user accounts
 *   design the output side of the interface
 *   list the back-end calls that the interface needs (e.g. from create and edit note to search operations) -- it seems that most (if not all) of these are already supported
Tom & Mike, is there anything I forgot?

As usual, feedback is welcome.

In general, my apologies for slow responses on this, but I am very busy with preparing the lessons for a new course I teach in the second half of this semester (on Computer Vision).

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/20110327/14210ce5/attachment-0001.html