UX/DH
Hosted by NYCDH Student Group, Pratt UX/IA, & Pratt ASIS&T
SILS Pratt Institute Manhattan Campus Room 609
Saturday, April 12, 2014UX/DH
The Pratt UX/DH event hosted by NYCDH Student Group, Pratt UX/IA and Pratt ASIS&T on Saturday April 12, 2014 covered a number of User Experience (UX) and Digital Humanities (DH) projects. Three separate projects were covered. Three members of the Pratt UX/IA Practicum group presented with three separate speakers on three different focuses of their project, Sean Fitzell covered UX as it can and should be applied to DH projects and William Dean discussed the Hidden Worlds project (http://hiddenworldsdb.org/drupal). The following is a brief discussion on interesting point and projects as well as my own musings about further intersectionality of these fields of User Experience and Digital Humanities.
The day began with three separate presenters all discussing areas of the work being done under the umbrella of the NYU UX Practicum. Carolyn Madeo discussed her endeavors in bringing the NYU libraries’ LibGuides inline in style, content and creating greater usability for the entire LibGuides platform at NYU. Juliana Culbert discusses using mouse click sensing software to create heat maps of how users really used the NYU Library website and especially the homepage as it is the actual and perceived portal to the NYU Libraries and its holdings. These heat maps were then employed in the creation of mock-ups and rough proto-types of new portal landing pages for the NYU Library system. Finally Sam Raddatz discussed her work trying to create an overall workable, usable and streamlined Information Architecture scheme for the new site design. It should be noted that NYU has not done a redesign of their library website for many years and it is really heartening to see them employing librarians, librarians in training, information professionals in their current efforts to do so.
Sean Fitzell was a strong advocate for the need for User Experience work in conjunction with the publication of online and especially interactive Digital Humanities projects. While this idea is relatively straightforward in nature I believe the implementation and application of the ideas Fitzell was discussing have met resistance from within the academy. Speaking from his own personal experience Fitzell mentioned the relative lack of interest in creating usable and pleasing to use DH tools. This lack is conspicuous in numerous large scale and ambitious DH projects –
The final presentation of the day focused on a Digital Humanities project Hidden Worlds, developed by William Dean along with J.D. Arden, Iris Bierlein, Nik Dragovic, Allison Hall and Ellie Horowitz. Dean presented the project as well as the idea Digital Humanities can and do have room for smaller projects concerned with less well known areas and ideas within the Humanities. As a student created, built and modelled project the Hidden Worlds website at hiddenworldsdb.org/drupal was an impressive interface and dealing with interesting subject matter. Many of the authors in the visualizations and author lists were those I had read as a youngster not realizing they were women. Conversely there were female authors profiled on the site whose works I had read knowing they were female authors but who had also published other works, unknown to myself, under male pseudonyms.
I had, initially thought based on the title of the event “UX/DH” that the speakers and projects presented would provide a view of the intersectionality or potential intersections of the two fields. To whit, the applicability of UX tools towards DH projects and data gathering particularly for DHers in the “group 1” camp began to percolate as soon as the day’s proceedings began with Ms. Madeo’s presentation on her work with NYU’s LibGuides and her testing methodology. In her talk about the Libguides at NYU, Madeo discussed her information gather process outlined as: gaining information about research behavior; gathering background data; gleaning information through use feedback about the usefulness, feel and experience of using a libguide. This final aspect of gathering information about an individual or group of users’ experiences utilizing technology struck me as very similar to DHers who study computers “as instruments, that is as heuristic tools that are a part of a methodological chain…” (Rieder et. al., 2012). Madeo’s work on LibGuides, a Content Management System primarily employed to create subject, reference or research guides at the college and graduate studies level or information seeking, brings to light the examination of computer use as a tool by a group of individuals with similar information seeking needs and practices. Rieder Bernhard and Röhle also assert such use of computers have significant implications at both the institutional as well as epistemological levels (2012). While Madeo’s work as a member of the UX practicum team is not inherently concerned with epistemology per se, her methods could be employed in a completely different context to create a corpus of data applicable to a DHer’s needs.
Similarly Ms. Culbert’s work really provided a window into the behavior of those using the system before them. Without stepping on the toes of HCI professionals, there is a lot of room for DHers to employ and benefit from the softwares packages and tools used by Information Architects and User Experience professionals. Mr. Fritzell in his pleas for greater involvement of UX in Digital Humanities projects was coming from a more practical and less theoretical angle, but his argument is extremely valid – no matter how nifty, useful or ground breaking a DH project or tool, unless it is usable it remains as opaque as a PhD dissertation upon a given subject. In breaking out of the academy digitally, DH has the potential to open many areas of wonder and interest to a massive population of web and computer savvy users – they simply need to be willing to take that great leap of faith and become truly transparent. The April 12th event at Pratt helped create conversation and connection between DHers and IA/UX practitioners both within the Pratt Library and Information Science community as well as beyond our little ivory tower. Hopefully, this interchange of information and ideas can continue into our professional lives outside the confines of Pratt.