We have begun our User Experience  design process. This is a very exciting stage of the project, where we really start getting a sense of the site will be like- how it will function and what it might look like.  It is also the time when all the hard questions have to be asked and decisions are made. What kind of experience do we want our users to have? Who are they? What will make them want to not only use the DAAO but contribute to it. How will all different types of users and stakeholders  get value from the DAAO? and then once we ‘think’ these solutions, we need to design them and make them practical and implementable for the site developer.

We are very fortunate to have to have a such a great team of people working with us.  I was particularly pleased to find out that House of Laudanum, (who are working with us also on User Experience design stage)  had  engaged Lotte Meijer to collaborate with them on the DAAO.  Lotte is a very talented artist and Interaction Design specialist, who I first meet five years ago, when I was a visiting scholar in the  Digital Design program at the Piet Zwart Institute,  Rotterdam.  Lotte had just completed her Masters in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam, and was doing amazing work on mobile interactive technologies and open-source publications.  She has since gone on to work at MOMA and the Museum of Contemporay Art, Chicago, designing all manner of quality content, high interaction sites.

Did I mention she has also won a Webby?

A Webby is often referred to as the Web version of an Oscar and Lotte was part of the Smart History Project that won  the 2009 Webby in the EDUCATION section. Yep, that’s the kind of team of team we are building here at the DAAO. Already Lotte and Zina and Snow from House of Laudanum are coming up with some great ideas to generate not only ‘good experiences’ for our users, but are also really focussing on how we build our community of users- so that we can start having real hubs of research activity accumulating around the DAAO. Its very exciting, but it is also a long term project- we need to get the foundations right, so we can keep growing and developing in the future.

This is NOT Lotte's Webby, but her kickball trophy that she won while working at MOMA. (As a team that has a high percentage of cyclists, we approve of sporty activities at the DAAO!)

One of the ‘users’ that we have really been focussing on  is the ‘contributor’. What is the experience of either writing a new record or updating and correcting an existing record like? This is question that moves well beyond just thinking about the  work flow rules of the site ( ie how a person can interact with the site) or the graphic design of the site, but moves alos into question fo motivation- why would anyone come, why would they stay? why would they contribute? Best practice in website production must take this kind of total systems approach and fortunately we have the skill set around us, the budget and an enormous amount of goodwill from pretty well everyone we deal with it. Everyone wants to help. I have to say, its the thing I love the most about working in digital cultures and online production- its a culture of sharing, collaboration and practical solutions.

In other words, the design needs to find a solution not only for the data but also a solution for a existing and potential users and that entails knowing about the context of use at both a micro level (what happens when you actually hits the buttons and use the site) and a macro level (what is happening in online public scholarly activity, who is funding what? what are the emerging norms of practice, where is the technology going etc)   But more about that in the next post!

There are many facets to the sustainability issue for a database that currently lives more or less on a grant to grant cycle.  But as we are engaging in the schema design (deciding which data needs to be further captured) and user experience  (don’t forget that people who contribute are also users – very important ones), I’ll focus in this post on how these issues impact on sustainability.

How can ensure the sustainability of the data? Who will provide us with the data we need and who will maintain it and keep it up- to-date. The DAAO currently operates  mainly as Data Service. That is to say, the DAAO’s contributors create content for the DAAO around the core business of ‘biography’. Our data describes the ‘life’ of an artist or designer. It provides information on where they were born, how they were trained, what work did they produce, it also provides information that can be used to ask questions like ‘who influenced them?’ (ie associates) , ‘who supported them?’ (ie institutions, curators, awards).  As we move through the consultation and research process,  researchers in the art and design history area have identified areas in which in would be useful to have more extensive capture of certain data- in particular more information about ‘works’ ( whether they be design objects or art works (of all manner of material/immaterial, and/or temporally and locationally distributed complexity) as well as more information on ‘exhibitionary spaces’ and who curates, funds and manages them.  The question then arises, who will input the information?  Who is doing research in these areas?  Or are there existing databses that already have much of the information we seek and could we leverage existing data collections by other people/institutions rather than re-entering information that is already maintained by other people?

For those who are already contributors to the DAAO, you will be well-aware of the large commitment it can take to complete a biographical record to the DAAO. If you are contributing a bio of almost any artist or designer, you may have as many as 20 exhibitions to enter, maybe a similar amounts of works ( often more if one is to be truly comprehensive), in addition to birth, date, training, associates, language, family etc fields to fill in.  It is daunting and has been identified as such by many potential contributors.  Our job is then to balance the differing demands on the database. The way that we do this falls roughly into three major considerations.

1) Think about data entry:  be  very judicious about what additional fields we want to capture. We do not want to put contributors off because we are asking too much of them. Contributing to the DAAO should be made easy and if possible pleasurable and satisfying. We want people to feel a benefit for their efforts.

2) Think about design. How can we make data entry easier for people to contribute- so the task doesn’t appear so daunting. We can modify the process- so that some fields auto-fill as the author is writing a bio. Or we can change the layout and presentation of data entry forms so they are easier to complete. We can also make it easier for people to just do small adjustments on records. Ie they can just add small bits of info to existing records to make them more complete.

3) Think about interoperability. Do other data sets exist that already have detailed information about entities ( such as works, exhibitions and prizes) that we could interoperate with.  So we can just put in relatively minimal information on an award and then provide a link to a  source database which has extensive information ( ie the AGNSW prizes database). In other words, we could operate as a portal to other information and thus expand our content by  aggregating data from other sources into our website.

So in a sense the issue of data capture becomes distributed. We want to produce a database that provides meaningful and accurate results for researchers. So how do we build on the strengths we already have and what new relationships can we develop with other scholarly researchers to extend our reach in a way that is realistic and sustainable?

This diagram below  is a rough drawing of what the DAAO is now and it also gestures to how we might grow. The DAAO is, in principle, a data service and a portal. Data service refers to the data that we upload and maintain.  That is, we are responsible for the data  being correct and up-to-date).  Portal refers to the data that we ‘interoperate with’- this can take the form of providing links to other data ( ie collections data from institutional repositories).  We also need to be judicious about who we decide to interoperate with. For instance, we need to ensure that the information that we are linking to is correct and up-to-date. The last thing we want to provide multiple links out to sites that no longer exist or are unable to maintain their own data.

To further complicate matters, we also need to make sure that we have sufficient data captured in some fields so that we can interoperate according to the metadata standards that enable data sets to be exposed to each other on the internet. This is also vital to our sustainability.

Fortunately, we have highly skilled pool of people who are helping us tackle the task.  In addition to our CIs and PIs and other disciplinary  experts who have been throwing all kinds of curly content capture problems at us so we can test the robustness of our schema, we also have the expertise of many data librarians/managers  across the GLAM ( Galleries, Musuems, Archives and Museum) sector who are generously providing advice and support to the DAAO’s Data Manager, Jo  ( shout out in particular to Ingrid Mason from the Powerhouse Museum!). Moreover our User Experience designers ( the House of Laudaunum)  have worked on many similar projects and are also providing valuable input into the technical issues of how we achieve our goals.

We are also fortunate that much of the DAAO’s original schema is pretty sound and is capable of capturing much of what we need with only a few modifications and extensions and clearer instructions on how to fill out the fields correctly. Much of the work is actually about mapping the relationship between the data fields, so that when we search we can actually produce meaningful search results.  By mid-november we should have a ‘test’ database online which  will test some of the key relationships between data that we are currently working  on. We will send you an email when it it online, so we can get your feedback.

crunch time. reports flowing in. feedback from CIs on phone and questionnaires. there has been lots of information coming in that we need to synthesize, process, and find where it fits in the  big jigsaw puzzle. Back to the whiteboard.

Last week began with refocussing on the incorporation of more design content. We start on a first pass with a type of centre/edge , type/topos approach.  Basically, we find people/groups/case that would constitute an ‘exemplar’ of hegemonic success in a field (in terms of established field criteria like prizes or commissions etc)  and  map those against other cases that push the borders of what is understood as ‘the field’.  We grid the case studies and then overlay  the connections between the types that help us think about other methods of organisation.

We then drill down in case studies to find tricky cases and map them against conforming ones. We find case studies that our existing schema might have trouble with. For instance, time, is a major axis of historical research- that is to say, it is a key filter that people will use on search queries.  In our database this category does a lot of work (as it attaches to so many categories). So we run tests that have time problems. For instance,  how to cover the issue of the changing names and principals and partners of design houses?  How can we the ‘period active’ category in the existing schema to raise more meaningful searches. As we go through this process it help clarifies how data relates to each other- so we can find the most elegant data design solutions that don’t introduce so many elements that takes us away from our core business of biography ( albeit, a dynamic and expanded notion of what constitutes a creative ‘life’) so we can draw upon and expand our strengths so our content can be sustained in a quality state in an online context.

I love iterative whiteboard days. Days of focussing on concrete problems, collaborating with Olivia and Jo, or Ross Harley ( our Lead CI) , or Tom Ruthven (UNSW Library Innovation) among others and working the thoughts though diagrammatically- dumping the thought and the standing back and altering till it finally morphs into something approaching either a ‘design’ or ‘description’..

But this is only part of the story.

We may know what we want- what our ideal database might be- but if that is not ground in a good ‘business case’, it won’t be sustainable. This is where the Business Analysis and Technical review plug in.

The Technical Review currently being undertaken by Sam Elliot of  Doric Order is revealing, unravelling and resolving lots of  issues that sometimes may seem tiny but given the intricacies of system ecologies can have huge impact. The good news is that we are discovering that we have quite an agile structure to our data, which will great help us as we add new elements to schema and improve our search functionality when we move in redevelopment stage.

Doric is also helping us organise  our ‘datawash’ which is basically the process of going through and correcting inconsistencies and errors in the way the data has been entered. This process not only helps the process of migrating the data into the extended schema, assists in search functionality but it is also a very useful diagnostic in helping us understand what fields generate errors  so we can design solutions. One day when Jo is not so busy working her magic with our data, I’ll see if I can get her to give us one of her mini master classes in data librarianship, which is has opened up the messy ecologies of the dataverse to me from a totally different perspective. ( (More on that later when i have my writer’s head on)

Lately, the team’s collective mind has been really focussed on schema design. We have working through the LIEF’s brief which requires that our database have more information on exhibitions, roles ( like curators, clients, gallery directors and secondary roles, like teacher, administrator etc) to help with generating more profound research queries. We have of course also been thinking a lot about “design”  as a content category and what particular data do we need in order to be able to describe in metadata fields the life of a designer.

From initial discussions with design researchers, it would seem that schematically- the life of designer has much in common with the life of an artist. Works (in the broadest sense of the term) are produced, often in collaboration with others. Careers are supported by others who collect, curate, commission works. This is great news as it means our definition of ‘a life’ as it is represented in our database is fundamentally robust enough to incorporate a designer. However there are of course some fascinating and fundamental differences that  also emerge the more one thinks about design.

One of my favorite new fields that I am keen to workshop with people is ‘place of manufacture’. This field emerges as an interesting area in a globalising world of flows in which the client maybe in New York, the designer in Melbourne and the manufacture in korea. It is a classic Manuel Castells, ‘Rise of the Information society’ moment and a database that could capture that information would produce some valuable research ( and the most amazing visualisations!….).

Jo, our Data Manager, is well into her analysis of the metadata schema and I am refocussing my energies back on design this week in preparation for the Design workshop later this month. We were discussing our process and Jo helpfully used the word ‘triangulation’ to describe the analytical process. Jo and I share a passion for diagrams and so of course she has whipped one up which deftly represents a synopsis of the process, we are undertaking at present.

So basically Jo is working on that HUGE bottom part of the pyramid. I am working the top part  ( and a bit of the left side) of the pyramid with various consultants, researchers and you.

I’ve also been looking at some of our existing content on designers. This on Hera Roberts is rather exemplary http://www.daao.org.au/main/read/5391 but if we scroll down what more information would we want in the details?  How to build a database that speaks meaningfully to the history of design as well as its present.

Word the the week: SERENDIPITY. It seems to be happening all the time in the is project. Just as Olivia and I are thinking ‘wish we had something on artist run initiatives’ Amy Griffith and her database appear ( via Joanna Mendelsohn) Today just as i was thinking, I need to chat to a design researcher, I find myself on the phone with Juliette Peers from RMIT who has helpfully provided me some extremely useful grid references for measures of esteem, historical challenges, exemplary designers and some pointed case studies ( like ARUP or 3Deep) to explore edges of what we need to capture.

The DAAO has finally got a Data Manager! Not a moment too soon. At this critical point of data design, we needed data management specialist to guide this phase of the project.  The arrival of Jo Croucher completes our core team and the impact of her expertise on metadata schema organisation has been immediate.  We now have one person totally dedicated to ensuring the viability  and quality of our data.  Not only does this enable us to make good critical technical and design decisions as we move into finalising design and preliminary testing of the project, but it also frees Olivia up to focus on organising our growing army of data miners and editor.

Our first full ‘core’  team meeting.

Jo, Olivia and Alice in the DAAO Office. (Who would have thought metadata standards could be so much fun!).

Many of you, particularly those of you on the Editorial Board and the Art- and Design Research Groups will have been receiving  quite a few emails from Olivia and I this week; informing you of consultation processes and timelines; providing reports and asking for feedback, updates on how work is proceeding on the MREII grant.

Others will have been talking to Zina Kaye, our consultant Business Analyst. I have now managed to have a lovely informative telephone conversation with everyone except two of our CIs who are currently overseas. Its been great to finally chat to everyone, it grounds the project back to its core business of research. I’ve been learning so much about Australian art history. I had no idea how little I knew. its wonderful to be on learning curve.

A lot of the recent communication frenzy is due to the fact that the jewel in the DAAO crown, Olivia Bolton, is about to go on her first holiday in way too long and so we are both finalising matters requiring her core knowledge before she goes off for a wonderful relaxing  email free month in France. It will calm down once Olivia goes at end September.

The project is really gearing up. We now have a Data Manager, Jo Croucher, who will work with us for 2 days a week until Christmas. Jo is seconded to us from UNSW library is a very able and tech savvy librarian who is very proficient in metadata organisation. She has come on board just in time as she will be crucial to our process of metadata field extension and refinement.

Over the next few weeks, you will find more activity happening on the Research Finding page as we start loading up summaries of your feedback to various tasks. By communicating to each other through google docs by way of questionnaires and forms, shared documents and then feeding them back into the blog, I am hoping to make the processes of our collaboration as transparent as possible. We also have the side benefit of generating documentation as we go.  I have posted up a table on the Research Results page that shows how CIs have been organised into groups that provide different resources to the DAAO over the life of the grant.

(BTW: Apologies to those members of the Art Advisory group that received a questionnaire with a repeat of block text in a section- working in those tiny workflow boxes in google forms is as bad as some of the text boxes in the back end of the DAAO.  Our proofer will pick up such errors in future!)

Its been a big week as we have been concentrating on Schema Design. We have  been analysing the new datasets that have been coming our way and continuing our phone and face to face interviews with CIs to clarify and refine exactly how we need to extend over coverage in the ares of Exhibitions, Organisations,  Galleries, Curators, Gallery Directors and more.

A lot of issues are emerging about how important it is to capture data on the development of Arts infrastructure and industries.  It is so exciting talking to the CIs about their research and to find out in detail how researchers are using the DAAO.  As I listen to Caroline Jordon or Cathy Speck talk about the history of Australian Arts infrastructure,  I keep seeing in my head all the amazing visualisations we could produce to articulate the relationships between money, people, insitutions, works and more over time. One of the most obvious example of the power of dynamic, relational visualisation as a research tool is Gapminder. http://www.gapminder.org/

Unfortunately such wonders are not for this LIEF, but we will be able a database which such good structure in this grant, that all kinds of uses of it will be possible for future development.

Another highlight of this week has been analysing Amy Griffiths’ research database on Artist Run Initiatives. Capturing the complexity of organisations and exhibitions is a key concern for this LIEF and being gifted such a well researched database on such a vital area really helps us design fields to capture previously elusive information.  Amy Griffiths is completing a Masters in Arts Administration at COFA.

We have now also organised the process of consultation and sign off for the SCHEMA DESIGN stage of this project.TWO advisory groups have been formed to drive the schema refinement and extension; ART  Advisory Group and DESIGN  Advisory Group.  The Editorial Board will ‘shadow’ discussions in both groups ( these will  be synopised to keep information manageable) and can contribute to discussions at the same time as the advisory groups.  The aim is for consensus between advisory group and editorial board and the process is designed to produce such outcomes.

The Diagram below maps the workflow of consulting, testing and sign off.

• –

We have almost completed initial consult stage

We have begun refining our scenarios and benchmarks.

Due to the tight timeline of this project, if we are to launch on time and complete on budget,we need a tight turnaround on feedback from our CIs.  We must remain on time. Please book some time in your busy schedules during the relevant weeks for feedback and testing. Each Advisory group will be notified of its timelines by email. Turnaround period will be one week.

We will email information for feedback to Groups and Ed Board. We will use online survey to gauge your feedback. WE ALWAYS WELCOME A PHONE CALL. Talking is very efficient. If you feel your feedback cannot be captured by the survey we provide. We can call you.

Once we get your feedback, we will make a quick wireframe database so we can test that we are capturing the relationships we need. We will be asking you to test the database by setting it the type of queries you need answered. Again the turnaround period will be one week.

Rebuilding the DAAO 1.0

This diagram represents an overview of the schedule, major components and milestones of the Project. It is a gantt chart in box form. As the project progresses, various little elements will change within it as we learn more – but the critical path should not change.

THATcamp Canberra is now finished, I’ve learnt so much in the past two days that it would take three days to write a coherent report. No time for that at present, so for now I’ll just list in  a random way the things I got from ThatCamp. There is the twitterfeed #thatcamp for more extensive documentation.

1. a network of like minded people working on related projects.  Some session felt like the best kind of masterclass. Very intense and very focussed.

2. the opportunities of variabilities of crowdsourcing,  and how important a good work flow design is for users. Best example i can think of is the NLA’s australia newspaper project http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper

3. I finally understand how semantic web and ontologies work!

4. networks, networks, networks… same as 1. but i need to reiterate how important meeting your institutional peers in an informal context is.

5. persistent URLS!

added: Trackability of record is vital for DAAO.  It is also interesting when thought of in a critical cultural light. The politics of identity and the persistence of identity as it relates to data and how that might relate to other politics of identity is a fascinating case study in metastability. ( I wonder if someone has done it?)

6. so many useful links for existing projects that have tools that we want –  no need for wheel reinvention. The DAAO’s delicious tags tell the story.  Look in the right column of this blog and click on DAAO delicious feed if you want to see more.

7. good citation information- the better you identify something, the easier it is to draw it back in. A repeat of No 5. But this is becoming a key issue for us in DAAO – as we have ambiguous information in our collections and artworks fields.

8. layers- safe layers and layer that users can play with.

9. Learnt more on dealing with Legacy issues, extensibility and transition paths.

10. A summation by another THAtcamp participant  http://rearleft.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/mo66g33k/

This week Olivia and I have been focusing on the schema changes we need to implement in order to capture additional information on Exhibitions.  We have been analysing Jonathan Holmes’ wonderful Art@Base exhibitions database, which, as well as providing much needed content, has provided a very useful model for an expanded exhibitions field structure.

We have also been using some initial User Scenarios (developed in my early scoping of the project) and actual CI research projects to develop benchmarks. We do this by mining your research proposals to elicit the series of queries that would satisfy the informational demands of your project. The diagram below represents the beginning of mapping such benchmarks. The project that we were scribbling about below has 6 major types of queries for the DAAO, i.e. report relationship between curators and exhibitions, or report relationship between exhibitions with X heritage values. At the moment the DAAO can only respond to 3 of the 6 type queries and it could not display the relationships between variables in a comprehensible way. Thus at the end of the project, we would expect the DAAO to answer all six questions and display results in meaningful and variable ways. So the more information we get about your research proposals, the better we can design how the new data we are incorporating can be organised.

Benchmarking using Researchers proposed projects

We have also started thinking about the processes of ingestion as new high quality research data appear out of dark to find a new home in the DAAO. In order for data to be ingested, we have to match the tables of different databases. Simply put, we need to lay out all the tables side by side in an excel document, compare the field structures and their naming conventions and then co-ordinate and systematise a matching of their structures. The diagram below came out of discussion I had with David Turnbull (Manager, Web and Innovation, UNSW), where we were talking about the process of an an ingestion module and how it interacts with the critical path of our project.

David is on our Technical Steering Committee, and he is one of many people around here that always has some time to explain and clarify technical issues. Another is the patient and sensible Laszlo Gercsov, UNSW Digital Library’s Systems Architect. We are very lucky to have such clever and helpful people around.

Modularising Development: Ingestion

The word of this week is LEGACY, which sounds ok until you match it with the word ISSUES.  Another of the helpful clever people around here at UNSW is CSE’s Daniel Woo. I’ve known Daniel’s work for years, but he has just finished managing a database project, and his calm words had the hard edge of fresh experience behind them. LEGACY ISSUES, he said. Ah yes. Migration path. On the list for next week.