Exposing cultural heritage through computer screens: Exposing cultural heritage through computer screens: The role of user-centered design in the DH Alejandro Benito Santos Universidad de Salamanca Alisa Goikhman, Amelie Dorn, Caitlin Gura and Barbara Piringer Austrian Academy of Sciences 2 “You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge.” ― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values 3 ▪ Humanity became digital only a few years ago. ▪ Digital Humanities changes continously. ▪ Students are forced to choose: you are not supposed to be both! ▪ Unfortunately official educational planning confirms this idea. ▪ Our duty is to understand what a digital humanist is. ▪ Future education will be based on these assumptions. Digital Humanities nowadays 4 Dialectology, Cultural Diversity, Lexicography, Ethnology, Etymology, History, Disambiguation... Algorithms, NLP, Graph Theory, SNA, Data Mining, Semantic Web, GIS, DataVis, Machine Learning... Mighty Computational Powers Humanists Computer Scientist 6 ▪ We have to pay attention to the dynamics of the process. ▪ We must provide tools, workflows and methodologies that facilitate this dialogue. ▪ Also keep an open-minded, proactive attitude towards the other party. ▪ Enable channels to communicate needs, requirements and feedback. Digital Humanities is a dialogue 7 ▪ 2 COST-funded STSMs were awarded to: ▪ A designer. ▪ A computer scientist. (that’s me!) ▪ Hosts: Centre for Digital Humanities (Austrian Academy of Sciences) and VisUSAL Group. (Universidad de Salamanca) ▪ Based on lexicographic data. ▪ Interdisciplinary approach. Results related 8 ▪ Design Theory. (User-centered design) ▪ Design/Cultural Probes. ▪ Agile software methodologies. ▪ User stories. ▪ Micro-prototyping. ▪ Citizen Science, Serious Games.. ▪ Visual analysis and exploration. ▪ Visualization is the communication channel! ▪ Upward trend in difficulty and specificity of applied visual techniques. Results in the fields of 9 10 11 ▪ Visual prototypes have been of major importance in the exchange of ideas. ▪ They have been one of the major research artifacts. ▪ They are the result of implementing in code the user stories and the materialisation of the design stage. Visualization and prototyping 12 ▪ First prototypes were naive. ▪ Functionality was very reduced. ▪ They provided snapshots of small parts of the data. ▪ Therefore: ▪ Sometimes they were not useful AT ALL. ▪ We detected this was something unexpected by a majority of team members. ▪ It was a tedious and necessary process. ▪ Often we had to build something only to know what was possible and what wasn’t. Evolution of prototypes (I) 13 Software Design Methodology Bernard et al. (2015) 14 What we initially had 15 What we imagined we could have 16 What we actually ended up having 17 Each micro-prototype explored one or more dimensions 1 2 3 4 5 6 18 “A dictionary is a lexicographical product which shows inter-relationships among the data” ― Sandro Nielsen, The Effect of Lexicographical Information Costs on Dictionary Making 19 Each micro-prototype explored one or more dimensions 1 2 20 https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B04nuiFE3H-ENnVBaVFtaUZpTUE/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B04nuiFE3H-ENnVBaVFtaUZpTUE/view 21 ▪ User-centered design fits well in the Digital Humanities and e- Lexicography in particular. ▪ Visualization promotes the exchange of ideas and serves as an extra (non-written) channel of communication between different teams. ▪ In the Digital Humanities, close collaboration may be more important than the technical complexity of proposed software solutions. ▪ That is why we need to pay attention to information flows. ▪ Identifying bottlenecks (amount) and miscommunication issues (quality) at early stages is vital for the success of a DH project. Conclusions 22 References ● Bernard, Jürgen, et al. "VisInfo: a digital library system for time series research data based on exploratory search—a user- centered design approach." International Journal on Digital Libraries 16.1 (2015): 37-59. ● Gardiner, Eileen, and Ronald G. Musto. "The digital humanities: A primer for students and scholars." (2015). ● Benito, A., Losada, A., Therón, R., Dorn, A., Seltmann, M. & Wandl-Vogt, E (2016) A spatio-temporal visual analysis tool for historical dictionaries. Proceedings of the International Conference Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality (TEEM).Salamanca, Spain. ● Dorn, A.,Wandl-Vogt, E., Bowers, J., Piringer, B., Seltmann, M (2016) exploreAT! – perspectives of exploring a dialect language resource in a framework of European digital infrastructures. 1st International Conference on Sociolinguistics. Insights from Superdiversity, Complexity and Multimodality (ICS-1), Abstract band. Budapest, Hungary. ● Wandl-Vogt, Eveline, et al. "Database of Bavarian Dialects (DBÖ) electronically mapped (dbo@ema). A system for archiving, maintaining and field mapping of heterogenous dialect data." Proceedings of the XIII EURALEX International Congress (Barcelona, 15-19 July 2008). Barcelona: Institut Universitari de Lingüistica Aplicada/Universitat Pompeu Fabra. CD. 2008. ● Abras, Chadia, Diane Maloney-Krichmar, and Jenny Preece. "User-centered design." Bainbridge, W. Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications 37.4 (2004): 445-456. ● B. Gaver, T. Dunne, and E. Pacenti. Design: Cultural probes. interactions, 6(1):21{29, Jan. 1999. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/291224.291235. ● Nielsen, Sandro. "The effect of lexicographical information costs on dictionary making and use." Lexikos 18.1 (2008): 170- 189. APA http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/291224.291235