By Lauren Allen
One of the major research studies laid out by the original grant proposal for our first year on this project is the analysis of expert practices in entomological taxonomy (specifically with taxonomists who are specialized in freshwater benthic macroinvertebrates. The working title for the academic paper to be published on these data and analyses is Entomological Expertise in Taxonomy:Harnessing Expert Practices in Observation and Classification to Inform Digital Identification Tools for Volunteer Biomonitors. In its introduction, I address the notion of the taxonomic impediment, the challenge of teaching volunteers the rigorous methods of entomological taxonomy and identification, and the benefits of studying expert practices in situ for informing the development of teaching and learning technologies.
In redesigning macroinvertebrates.org, we are focusing on three levels of the current system: the macro, or the architecture of the site, where pages go in relation to each other, and what the general structure and flow of the website is like - whether the site will be structured more like a key or a guide, for example. At the meso-level, our concern is with the interactions on the page – what the layout and structure of each page will be like, what content and how it will be available. At the micro level, we are concerned with the microinteractions, the various cues and feedback mechanisms that the user will encounter interacting with the site. I’ve been assembling a list of precedents looking at macro and meso level strategies in dealing with content. The Great Animal Orchestra is a great example of a website that seeks to train people to listen and identify various biomes and animal sounds. It encourages the user to put on their headphones, and leads them through a selection of various regions, using circular spatial metaphors to slowly train users to isolate specific sounds. A multiple choice game that asks you questions about what you’ve just heard is an interesting way to evaluate if users are learning. The British Museum’s website has an interesting way of isolating and highlighting various paths the user can take to view information. While the current site follows a chronological format, the user can isolate specific areas to view chronologies of. The website also uses overlays to give away information in a neat, concise manner. Codeology is interesting because of the way that the grid structure is laid out, where hovering the mouse over a specific square causes it to animate and rotate. Possibly could be used as a precedent for interactions for the website where hovering over an insect square enlarges and magnifies it. The Harvard Art Museum website uses a more standard grid interface, but interestingly allow for panning and zooming into the high resolution images on the site. The Google font gallery uses a detailed sidebar with the ability to use sliders to change variables and update things in realtime. In addition to this, the various modules in the grid also allow for changing around variables and being able to see how the type changes and looks - this is really important as an example of how to manipulate and compare different images without necessarily diving in a level deeper.
When I spend time with volunteers and learners, I try to spend the first part of my time with them listening to the things that they talk about and the ideas and questions that they have. This group of young people were very inquisitive about the world around them--something that probably led to their participating in this program. They asked lots of questions about trees, birds, insects, and the ecology of the parks and streams that we visited over the past few weeks.
By Jen Liu
The Diagnostic Charactier (DC) annotation tool we are developing for the Macroinvertebrates.org project builds off of the original Interest Point (IP) annotation tool which was developed for museum curators to create, edit and manage the multimedia content overlays associated with interest points placed at set zoom levels in a high-resolution, multiscalar image (e.g. CMNH/Stories in the Rock, Museum of the White Mountains/Beyond Granite).With funding from the Benedum Foundation, Meadowcroft Rockshelter & Historic Village is currently using the IP Tool to annotate gigapixel exhibit images of their archaeological site in Western Pennsylvania that contains evidence of the earliest human presence in North America for online learning. Study Purpose To get a better sense of the disciplinary content management, curation and annotation requirements of different subject matters, we conducted a semi-structured task analysis with Andrew Donovan, the Program Coordinator at Meadowcroft via a video call. He is currently using the tool to annotate Gigapan images of the site to be used as an educational tool for teachers to use with students before and after visiting the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter national historic site. By Lauren Allen Part of designing a new content management system (CMS) for our online teaching collection is thinking about and understanding how the entomologists who will use the system and who know the insects best already organize their information and online workspaces. In particular, we have looked at two different spreadsheets that our entomology team shared with us to understand how the data are structured, and how they think about the Diagnostic Characters (which are the distinguishing features of the insects being annotated) to identify insects. Another example of how entomologists organize their thinking around these insects comes from the entomology graduate student who will be creating the majority of the diagnostic character annotations for the expanded collection on www.macroinvertebrates.org. She shared with us a spreadsheet she created based on Merritt, R. W., & Cummins, K. W. (1996). An introduction to the aquatic insects of North America, the dichotomous key used to identify stream insects in a step-by-step fashion. Two screen shots of that spreadsheet are featured in the gallery below. Notice the sequenced order of captions for each paired set of diagnostic characters. This organization strategy is influencing how we design the content management system that she will use to upload taxa information and annotations to the expanded teaching collection. The realization that there are many, many repeated diagnostic characters across orders and families was important for how we are designing the content management system. In the past system, for only 12 insects, it wasn't so terrible to have to input each diagnostic character for each individual specimen. But when we are dealing with multiple views of 50+ fully annotated specimens, our entomologists will need to be able to enter the order, family, and genus level diagnostic characters and want to know that they will be automatically updated to all the insects within those orders, families, and genera, while bearing in mind that custom overrides are need for special cases.
Design Implications We are excited about the the new kinds of digital possibilities this highly structured, hierarchical organization of information, annotated diagnostic characters in sub-sampled areas of the images and the ensuing affordances for brand new visual ways of filtering, comparing and contrasting views of different diagnostic characters within and across different orders and families of insects. Our designer, Jen Liu an Emerging Media Master's student at Carnegie Mellon University, is helping us brainstorm ways to organize the new content management system and image annotation tool for the expanded online teaching collection at www.macroinvertebrates.org. For the first round iterations, she began by sketching potential screens layouts in her notebook and scanned them in for us to look at and discuss. Some of the important features surfaced were the need to have a visual overview of the entire database, and have the insects organized from the beginning in the taxonomic hierarchy that biologists use—Genera [that's the plural of Genus] within Families, Families within Orders, etc). If you looked at the original forms for this information, you'll see a lot of the same sorts of information, just organized all in one place. We are still working on designing this CMS-- early paper prototyping of the digital system is a really helpful step because it allows the team to flexibly to imagine the system and possible design directions without yet committing to downstream solutions.
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