Wayfinder: Building an interface for a Web archive Meghan Dougherty University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 206/4999610, 001
[email protected] ABSTRACT This paper describes Wayfinder, a personalizable interface for Web archives through which users interpret and understand archived Web artifacts through their individual exploration. The interface was designed, developed, and implemented to enable readers of Web archives to explore, annotate, and discuss archived Web artifacts. Through this interface, users discuss and digest their own and others' experiences of Web culture within the boundaries of an expertly curated Web archive. Wayfinder is an exhibit aid, a teaching tool, and a research tool that provides access to an expertly annotated collection of archived Web objects, and opens the collection up to non-expert interpretation. Wayfinder can be found at http://wayfinder.webarchivist.org.
Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2. [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces – interaction styles, user-centered design.
General Terms Design, Experimentation.
Keywords Digital cultural heritage, ethnoclassification, production, preservation, user-experience.
knowledge
1. INTRODUCTION In this paper, one primary premise guided the development of concepts and roles for digital cultural heritage into an example of an interface for accessing collections of digital cultural heritage – or Web archives. This foundational premise suggests that there exists a nonsensical, yet impactful, contextualization that takes place as users surf the Web; they develop their own categorization schemes to make sense of objects they encounter while surfing the Web, especially while browsing a dynamically linked and topically bound archived subset of Web artifacts as found in a Web archive. In social systems, users make sense of objects, and refer to interpretive traces that others leave behind during their sense-making activities in order to build new interpretations. In this paper, the premise is taken further to imply that categorization schemes generated by users should be captured and maintained to enrich documentation and preservation of Web archives. Wayfinder is a personalizable interface for Web archives through This work is licensed under a Attribution- NonCommercial -NoDerivs 2.0 France Creative Commons License. IWAW’07, June 23, 2007, Vancouver, B.C.
which users interpret and understand archived Web artifacts through their individual exploration. It was designed to enable readers of digital scholarship to explore, annotate, and discuss archived Web artifacts. Through this interface, users discuss and digest their own and others' experiences of Web culture within the boundaries of an expertly curated Web archive. Wayfinder is an a research tool, a teaching tool, and an exhibit aid that provides access to an expertly annotated collection of archived Web objects, and opens digital cultural heritage to non-expert interpretation. The interface incorporates social scholars’ research, curators’ stewardship, and users’ vernacular language to help us all discuss and understand digital culture, and lend a hand in its preservation. The rich marks of evolutionary change in digital cultural heritage are invisible and often occur only within the individual user’s experience of Web artifacts – we tend disregard artifacts in cybercultural history in general. There are few organized efforts to preserve the Web, and even fewer that aim to qualitatively document the archives they build as collections of cultural heritage. In large user-annotated Web collections, there is no common catalog, other than ad-hoc user tagging systems, and no boundaries to define collections. Web archiving offers an opportunity to combine bounded heritage practices with inclusive Web annotating practices to preserve a rich cultural heritage of the Web. The information ecology found on the Web requires a merger of approaches grounded by scholarship but accessible to many in a number of ways that engage audience members actively. User engagement with Wayfinder expands stewardship duties beyond subject experts to include members of Web culture. The maintenance of the interactions with archived Web artifacts enabled by Wayfinder is an example of how these concepts can be used as values to guide the development of rich contextual preservation of digital cultural heritage. Collecting user experience and conceptualization of the artifacts users encounter on the Web, and sharing those experiences with others, enables us to conceive of our experience of media and its impact on our perceptions, values, thought and behavior as cultural heritage. The development of Wayfinder highlights unique concerns for digital artifact interpretation and preservation by exploring the possibility of including meaning of Web artifacts made collaboratively by users, and social possibilities for stewardship in digital cultural heritage. Wayfinder pinpoints a particular location within the design space demarcated by social navigation [12, 13], interaction history [11, 24], advances already made in Web archiving , and digital cultural heritage [6] to bridge
a gap between interpretive cataloging efforts and information retrieval efforts. This paper first describes the Wayfinder system including primary features, specifications, and a description of the study period. This description is followed by an overview of the literature domain and prior work in Web annotating within which Wayfinder fits. Findings about user interaction with the Wayfinder system are presented along with lessons for future implementation. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role of the interface in Web archiving.
2. THE WAYFINDER SYSTEM Wayfinder users can browse or search to view artifacts in a small collection drawn from a larger Web archive on the topic of political Web campaigning in the United States. The artifacts in the smaller collection illustrate research conducted by Kirsten A. Foot and Steven M. Schneider, and published by MIT Press. The Web Campaigning Digital Supplement [20] is the online installation of their research where the artifacts can be viewed in the context of the expert interpretations that the scholars provide. For each artifact in the accessible collection, a Wayfinder user can (1) view catalog information that is a small sample of artifact metadata compiled by Webarchivist.org catalogers, and particular to the research conducted using this archive (see Figure 1), (2) tag the artifact with keywords that make sense to her and view previously entered keywords (see Figure 2), (3) write longer annotations or notes describing the artifact or idea related to the artifact and view previously entered notes (see Figure 3), or (4) view a list of the other users who have viewed the artifact also (see Figure 4). All of the information a user adds to Wayfinder – tags and notes – are available to all other users. Tags appear as they are entered and are not associated with a particular user, but may be edited or deleted by the tagger who entered it. A note is continually editable by, and associated with, the user who entered it. Users can learn from other archive surfers by browsing their notes about artifacts referenced in the Web Campaigning text. Users can add each other to their personal Contacts lists to follow each other through the collection and to share ideas (see Figure 5). Once one user is added to second user’s contact list, the first user can view that user’s browsing history and follow their paths through the collection. Wayfinder enables users to browse, tag, and note to build individual interpretations and representations about Web artifacts and also determine new conceptual paths through the collection by engaging with others’ ideas.
Figure 1. Wayfinder Object Viewer showing catalog information view.
Figure 2. Wayfinder Object Viewer showing tag view.
how we cooperate to produce knowledge about our cultural past, and how we influence each other when producing knowledge. Wayfinder was intentionally designed to be open to digital archives that are not necessarily Web archives. The Wayfinder design grew from tool-building efforts in scholarly Web archiving. While Wayfinder could easily be adapted as an interface to other types of digital collections, Web archiving is a field particularly suited to experimentation with interfaces such as Wayfinder. Web archiving aims to preserve the Web to varying degrees. The Wayfinder design experiments within the varying degrees of those boundaries while enabling one way for Web archiving to impact documentation and preservation practices for other types of digital collections.
Figure 3. Wayfinder Object Viewer showing note view.
Figure 5. Wayfinder user’s My Collection view showing Contacts list. Wayfinder was developed by combining Ruby and PHP Web programming languages. The Ruby on Rails framework was used in the main interface and the operations of artifact annotating. PhpBB was used for hosting user forums and keeping track of user sessions.1 MySQL was used for backend database 1
Figure 4. Wayfinder Object Viewer showing user list view. The interpretive traces left by previous users can easily be stumbled upon by new users; examining these traces can reveal previously tread paths through the collection. On a small scale, Wayfinder begins to uncover the social and collaborative nature of knowledge production by enabling access and interaction with a small collection of primary source artifacts, and maintaining an open record of user navigation through a collection, the interactions between users and artifacts, and each other. With these histories, we can render transparent how we understand,
For each user logon, a new session is created at a given time. Each click to a new artifact (object ID and associated URL) marks a new timestamp within that session. A new session is created each time a user logs on. Time spent viewing objects in Web-based systems is a problematic metric and was not included in this study for two reasons. (1)
(2)
The sessions mark only the time a user logs in, or jumps to a new artifact. The session does not mark when a user logs out of Wayfinder. For users who logged on to Wayfinder, viewed one artifact, then logged off, there is no indication of when the user stopped viewing the object, so time spent viewing cannot be determined. Web users typically do not work with only one application or window open on their desktops; rather Web users typically
management system. For the duration of this study, Wayfinder ran on an Apache Web server with mod_fcgi module on FreeBSD Unix. At the time of its launch in October 2006, Wayfinder was unlike existing folksonomic tagging tools on the Web because its primary function is not that of a shared personal information management system with a labeling tool for a massive collection of data. Wayfinder was intended as an interface to small collections of archived artifacts that have some existing layer of expert interpretation. Where many existing tagging tools provide opportunities for personal information management – the organization of Web site bookmarks or digital images – Wayfinder offers an interface where relationships between nonexpert users, and between experts and non-experts could be developed in an effort to support inclusive and representative knowledge production within bounded Web spheres [10, 19] or bounded sets of Web artifacts for the purpose of preserving digital cultural heritage.
3. WAYFINDER WITHIN A DESIGN SPACE As Web archiving develops, opportunities exist to make these archives and the scholarship that evolves from them more inviting to a broader audience while engaging that audience as interpreters and contributors in cycles of knowledge coproduction. This inclusive approach necessitates reconsideration of representation, validity, and evaluation of knowledge production practices. Inclusive and exclusive processes of knowledge production, quality of knowledge production, and validity of knowledge production and representation are integral questions for challenging current practices in collecting, preserving, and displaying cultural artifacts, and for mitigating conflict over differing epistemological approaches to knowledge production. Current literature and best practices for knowledge production, representation, quality assurance, and validity must be challenged to meet the needs of rapidly changing social information environments and user needs. Different modes of interactive communcation are key for creating shared knowledge socially. Social navigation was introduced by Dourish and Chalmers [9] when they noted that people move toward clusters of other people, or follow in paths previously laid by others. The desire lines created by people cutting new paths through open green spaces are real-world examples of this. The same activity occurs in information spaces. People often turn to work with multiple programs running, and are active an several windows at once. Assuming that the time elapsed between clicks from one artifact in the collection to the next is an indication of the time a user spent viewing a particular artifact would be to assume that the user was paying attention to or examining the artifact during that time lapse. Without direct observations of users engaging with Wayfinder, it cannot be assumed that users spent the time that elapsed between clicks between artifacts engaging with the site. Time and date of access were used only to determine the path a user took from one artifact to the next in Wayfinder – the users’ click streams.
other people when they need information rather than turn to formal information management systems. Observations of behavior in crowds, in urban settings and in informal personal settings, reveal that people tend to ask others for advice in wayfinding and evaluating in real space or information space rather than consulting official documents such as maps or other publications [17, 22, 23]. Not only do we find our way through spaces by following crowds or trails left by people, but we also evaluate the things we find in those spaces by understanding them in a social context. We try to determine how others may have used an artifact or data we come across, and use that information to help us understand how we might apply the artifact for our own use. The design space within which Wayfinder was developed opens possibilities for inclusion and representation in stewardship of digital cultural heritage to mirror the openness and cooperativeness of cybercultural media environments within which digital cultural heritage resides. The construction of a platform for inclusion and representation in Wayfinder is a departure from previous explorations in folksonomy and Web tools for user-generated content. Wayfinder incorporates usergenerated content into preservation practices for stewardship of digital culture, whereas many other folksonomy tools begin their design exploration from the perspective of information retrieval. These foundational premises guide design in different directions. Museum practices are combined with rigorous digital scholarship and made accessible for experts of all kinds to add vernacular input to collections of Web cultural artifacts. This combination treats folksonomic interpretation of archive artifacts as a form of storytelling that can add to the preservation of digital culture in addition to providing an information retrieval aspect. Collaborative filtering, or folksonomy, allows for a degree of both information retrieval and qualitative documentation. These systems can enable both preservation functions and information retrieval functions, not necessarily based on predicting what a user needs to know, but by recording what a user learns while looking and tagging artifacts for future use. Definitions for the descriptive tags entered by users to create a folksonomy are loose enough that the user is able to learn from others, to learn while doing, relearn, and learn anew with future iterations of tagging. In systems such as Flickr (http://www.flickr.com), people tend to use tags as keywords; they describe and they place a lot of value on being able to find tagged data with a search, and less value on having cleanly organized items. These systems accumulate many tags with low occurrence counts, but provide great ease when searching and keeping found things found [16]. However, this analysis of tagging is shortsighted. Tags do not categorize as much as they represent different possible states of interpretation. This is a more dynamic understanding that takes into account the avenues tags can create for knowledge production. Tags represent different ways to sort data. Each ‘sort’ according to a specific theme, enables a new way to interpret the collection of artifacts. They represent a group of ideas from which meaning can be generated, and possibleinterpretation from which knowledge can be produced. Pragmatic concerns are arising from technological innovation for information infrastructures, current acquisition, documentation,
and access practices particularly in museums, and data quality is necessarily as a subsequent concern requiring attention [1, 2, 4, 5, 14]. Cameron [3, 4] identifies a new generation of online collections influenced by a merger between the push to move collections online and incorporate technological innovation and the post-structural shift in museological meaning making. These online collections, exemplified by the Experience Music Project (http://www.emplive.com), and the Hypermuseum (http://www.HyperMuseum.com), enable artifacts in a collection to be interpreted differently in different usage situations, and rethought to be productive outside of the collection’s boundaries. “This offers alternative pathways through collections information while posing greater contextual possibilities around objects through the inclusion of additional multimedia and text based information. Above all, it empowers the user to create pathways through and new organizations of information thereby contributing to the development of the knowledge environment” [3]. There is a trend forming in information management toward volunteer research, and enabling those from outside official information management structures (institutional catalogers and researchers), and those with different expertise participate in researching and contributing keywords to artifacts in collections (e.g., the U.S. Postal Museum’s Arago project, the Powerhouse Museum’s Electronic Swatchbook, and Steve – the Art Museum Social Tagging Project developed by a team of a number of institutions, etc.). Wayfinder was designed to offer an opportunity to combine efforts of experts and non-experts, to recognize different definitions of expertise, and to create a community of knowledge production around small collections in addition to providing a venue for volunteer cataloging. Web archive readers who have an interest in the thematic thrust of a particular Web archive, or have an interest in social tagging tools can be valuable sources for providing structure to collections of archived Web artifacts that may otherwise go undocumented, or remain available only to scholarly experts. These online collections mirror the tools popular in Web 2.0 that take advantage of user input for organization, sharing capabilities of networks, both social and technical with an emphasis on search and findability. A next generation of online collections could lean toward Web 3.0 tools that place a premium on meaning making and sharing in addition to the personalization focus of Web 2.02.
2
Web 2.0 is described by Tim O’Reilly as a larger concept driving the development of the Web after its turn from older software paradigms featuring application packages sold as a product bundles to provide gateways to Web content. In O’Reilly’s definition, there is a distinction made only between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 paradigms. See O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0? Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. Retrieved May 19, 2007, from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-isweb-20.html. Web 2.0 technologies are further explicated to make a finer distinction discerning Web 2.0 from Web 3.0. A distinction is made on the basis of personalization and sociability as related but separate functions manifested differently in Web 2.0 technologies. Web 3.0 technologies, as described my John Markoff, are those 2.0 technologies that include a more social extension of the personalization made available by Web 2.0 technologies. In this paper, I follow Markoff’s definition to explore the
The motivation for designing Wayfinder was the role that social navigation (where people personalize, filter, and refer to each other for help making meaning) and interaction history (the traces people leave behind after interacting with objects) could play in redefining preservation and interpretation for cultural heritage – especially when facing the task of documenting Web artifacts. The live Web is connected, dynamic, and is highly influenced by “do it yourself” and “do it together” attitudes that have inspired people to create and organize on the Web in social networks that can be large and dispersed, but are individually designated (c.f., Ning, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook). This radical and individual approach to information organization that includes recommending, networking, tagging, swarming, and sharing has gained tremendous speed on the Web since it is well suited to organizing the myriad types of information accessible there and the varying needs of its users. This shift in collection documentation and display is caused by a shift in knowledge production paradigms that was fueled by Web culture and the possibilities for personalization. As paradigm shifts trickle down to impact practices and as practices shift with the possibilities of technology to impact the direction of paradigm shifts, it is imperative that we explore possibilities for change in our cultural heritage institutions so we may document and advance with these shifts. Web archiving, as a relatively new field still determining its best practices and its place in cultural heritage, and as a field that is intimately familiar with the interconnected and inclusive nature of artifacts on the Web, is an ideal field within which to explore social interfaces for broader audience engagement. It would also be beneficial to continue this exploration in scholarship to determine how these shifts can affect research methods. Influenced by personalization and social knowledge production tools, Web archiving can become a method not only to capture, store and represent archived Web resources, but also to collect rich contextual data familiar in ethnographic procedures and even be used as a way to engage readers in scholarship.
4. WAYFINDER IN USE In this study, Wayfinder users created personal accounts and entered the Web Campaigning collection by browsing, searching, or reviewing their browsing history. Users searched for tags entered by themselves or other users, or searched for catalog information. Artifacts were displayed in a selection of frames from which the users could choose including catalog data, tags, notes, and contacts – scholarly experts supplied data for the catalog view, users supplied data for the tags and notes views, and the contacts view showed a list of users who had viewed artifacts previously. Wayfinder users tagged and annotated artifacts from the collection to create an individual subset, My Collection, based on their browsing history. Participants cataloged in their own terms, took notes and shared ideas with scholars, friends, or colleagues. social potential that can develop from the personalization enabled by Web 2.0 technologies through tagging and bookmarking.
Artifacts viewed and tagged were kept in a list so users could revisit and consider how what they viewed previously affects what they may view next. Users could become curators, exploring and organizing a collection to build their own ideas and interests within the tags and notes fields. These ideas and interested were displayed to other users of the system and so are shared among all users. Wayfinder provided opportunities for experience - not simply access - where users could experience exhibits of archived Web artifacts, and supply interpretations of their own experiences of the artifacts in the online digital collection. This was a space for users to coproduce ethnographic work, construct personal meaning through experience and extend that meaning to the world by sharing it with other users, thus creating more platforms for new meaning. Wayfinder continues to collect data as of the publication of this article, but the study period began upon its launch in October 2006, and ended in January 2007. During this time, Wayfinder had 21 users who entered both tags and notes. A number of other users created accounts and logged into the system multiple times, but merely browsed and did not otherwise engage with the system. These cursory users were not included in the study. 130 unique tags3 were entered into the system, and 90 notes were entered. Users left interpretive traces of their understanding about artifacts in the collection. These interpretive traces can be followed by reading tags and notes left by users to describe artifacts, and can spur on new interpretive paths through a collection of archived artifacts. Some of these traces provide a history of interpretation or a frame of reference. One Wayfinder user, as an example of several who used a similar strategy, followed a certain path through the collection inspired by a theme. He left traces of his interpretations as a breadcrumb trail to remind himself of similar objects within that theme. Over the course of four sessions, dar2214 visited seventeen unique artifacts, some several times. During those sessions, the user left eight tags, and seven annotations. The eight instances of tagging consisted of the application of only two tags, “washington” and “senate.” This user clearly had an agenda and was aiming to draw together specific artifacts in the collection to form a specific subset. Upon further inspection, the notes entered by this user are far more 3
Common words such as “is, a, an, the…” were ignored. Common words such as these appeared as single word tags in Wayfinder because the user who intended to enter them as a phrase inadvertently entered the phrase without quotation marks and so rendered each word as an individual tag. Since these phrases appeared to other Wayfinder users as individual single-word tags, they are included in the analysis as singleword tags. First names were ignored. Since last names appeared on the list and each first name could be matched with a last name in the tag data, it was assumed that user intended to enter a candidate’s name as “Patty Murray”, for example rather than as two separate single-word tags, “Patty” and “Murray”. Some users enter first and last names, and some entered only last names as tags. Using the last name only represents all of the artifacts tagged with proper names since no users used only first names to tag artifacts. Similar words such as interaction and interactivity, or learn, learns, learned, learning were combined under one-word representative tags.
detailed, and seem to be used in concert with tagging. The user’s tagging behavior drew a thread between a particular subset of artifacts for which the user then began developing his own comparisons between the artifacts based on particular concepts borrowed from the scholarly catalog data. This user began to develop his own specially curated subset of artifacts within the larger collection. Anecdotally, I learned later that this Wayfinder user compiled these notes to support his writing of an academic paper on campaign practices on the Web; he used Wayfinder as a research tool to support his exploration of an idea supported by evidence found in a the Web Campaigning Web archive. Some Wayfinder users’ artifact annotations showed a broader audience engaging with scholarship as interpreters and contributors in cycles of knowledge coproduction. The application of specialized terms in annotations and tagging made it clear that some users had interacted with the scholarly research on the Web archive accessible through Wayfinder before accessing the collection. Learning specialized terms from the scholarship enabled them to enter the collection via Wayfinder, find artifacts in addition to those that were referenced directly in the scholarship and apply the terms they had learned to these new examples from the collection. The three following annotations were posted in Wayfinder under the same artifact in the span of two minutes. The mobilizing practice shows up as a promotion of the candidate as an invite to share with friends why the visitor is a supporter of John Kerry (posted by Tanya). After searching under "mobilizing" Kerry's website was the first several screenshots to show, he does an excellent job or giving people opportunities to mobilize. But why aren't the other candidates up higher? Their choice (posted by Deirdre)? Kerry had several pages, which utilized the practice of mobilization. Presidential candidates obviously have more resources but I wonder why those running for other offices haven't picked up on this practice as integral to a successful web campaign (posted by Lili). This series of annotations show users not only learning and understanding terms form the scholarly experts, but also shows them finding additional examples of the concepts in artifacts in the collection, and shows the users reacting to each others’ interpretive traces as they enter them. It shows how the users left annotations in Wayfinder to expand on the concepts offered by scholarly experts. In these annotations, the users make assumptions and extend the details of the artifact at hand to new variables that might change the nature of the details. These users were able to extend the scholarly experts’ interpretations to new artifacts. Wayfinder enabled them to engage with scholarship in a
coproductive manner that added to the scholarship, and added to their experience of the scholarship. A much larger set of user supplied data, including their interpretations entered into the system and possibly compared with demographic data - and gathered over a lengthy period of time - might reveal the extent to which soliciting user interpretations of collection artifacts could produce representative documentation. Over time, users may tend toward each other in their interpretations to form some sort of agreement that does or does not align with scholarly or curatorial interpretations. Predictably, novel interpretations would be a constant given the introduction of new users to the system over time. Longitudinal analysis of progression of novel terms and the status of common terms could reveal interesting findings about the development of popular interpretations of Web culture. Common or novel terms might reveal patterns of developmental interpretation. Wayfinder enabled users to challenge authority in information management and subsequently in knowledge production practices in several communities of practice. Museum and other social science fields take a variety of approaches to address the problem of authority in knowledge production, at times embracing interpretive or discovery methods of knowledge production. There are risks involved with these approaches that influence the resulting shape of information institutions addressing these problems in a digital culture. Wayfinder addressed interpretation and display in a manner that takes advantage of the connecting and engaging capabilities of networked digital media. Wayfinder demonstrated the principles, practices, and structures that value cultural artifacts in a broader sense as polysemic entities whose narratives and classificatory systems are products of opinion and perspective. The design encouraged users to develop conceptual paths through collections of Web artifacts. These paths were forged individually as users searched and browsed through the collection finding artifacts and interpreting their meaning. These paths were also forged collaboratively as users searched and browsed the collection, and viewed others’ interpretations before coming to their own conclusions about meaning, or to modify their previous interpretations.
5. LESSONS FOR FUTURE IMPLEMENTATION In my design of Wayfinder, I made strategic choices that I thought would enhance the users’ experience, but ultimately detracted from it. As mentioned in previous chapters, users expressed frustration with creating contact lists in Wayfinder. They wanted to establish their social network within the system first before exploring the collection. In my design, I foregrounded the individual users’ interactions with artifacts and relegated contacting other users as an activity that would occur after a user explored the collection. In the conceptualization and design stages of building Wayfinder, it was important to foreground interaction with artifacts because I was attempting to build a tool that would engage people in the interpretation of artifacts, and consider the
influences on their experience later upon revisiting an artifact. I imagined interpretation in Wayfinder as an iterative process. And while this was true, users still wanted to establish contact with friends first. This may have prevented users from reflecting on other users’ interpretations to the extent that I intended. They may have influenced each other more if they could determine first whom they wanted to contact, and then recognize unfamiliar users’ whose ideas they appreciated later. In the overall development of the project, I assumed that maximization of cooperation between different actors in digital culture, both heritage professionals and users, was positive and would benefit the development of digital cultural heritage stewardship. My research goals reflect this assumption, and while there are certainly arguments against it, I recognize these differences as differences in epistemology and ontology that influence practice, and I used this project to advocate maximization of cooperation. Despite the assumptions in the goals of my research I was able to make contributions to cultural heritage, Web archiving, and digital scholarship. I was also able to determine key implications of this research on the field of digital cultural heritage. To determine Wayfinder users’ ability to engage with collections and generate new ideas, the features for sense-making found in Wayfinder might be tested against Dervin’s sense making theory [7, 8]. This theory describes information seeking behavior, and is based on the idea that people seek information when they encounter an obstacle. To overcome the obstacle, people seek and revise information for new perspectives that may be salient. Situation, obstacles, paths around obstacles, and utilities that aided in overcoming the obstacle are all metrics for determining sense making. While Wayfinder is not a tool to aid in information seeking, it is a tool designed for sense making. The application of Dervin’s sense making to a nuanced tool that divides information seeking from information evaluation may be valuable for understanding how we individually, and collectively understand information, particularly as scholarship and cultural artifacts. Had the data collection period gone on longer, and more users encourage to interact with the collection, either in the classroom as students, or as natural readers of the expert scholarship on the collection, many of these one-time-use tags may have revealed more popular themes for new interpretations of the collection artifacts. A longer data collection period might also reveal changes in interpretation of artifacts as digital culture advances and users become more and more Web savvy. Over a longer period of time with more consistent use, individual users would develop their own expert themes or tagging frameworks for themselves either by developing outside projects to examine artifacts (as a student might do), or simply by being familiar with the collection and what it holds. Regular users of tagging systems, over a longer period of time can develop a familiarity resulting in more discernible patterns [15, 21, 25]. Discernible patterns were rare in Wayfinder not only because of the short study period, but also because many tags are used only once. This infrequent occurrence of tags does not help the user in their efforts to search or discovery as many professionals in the
field express as a goal or motivation for providing this type of tool for patrons. Wayfinder lacked a seemingly necessary feature that may have changed this – users could not view a list of all tags entered into Wayfinder. If users could see a list of tags they used previously, or could choose from a list of tags entered by all users in addition to entering a new tag for every artifact, there may have been more clustering in concepts contributed by users through clusters of tags. This clustering is necessary for discovery and search goals. New interpretations can be seen readily, but users would have a difficult time discovering or rediscovering artifacts in certain themes, as they would only ever find one artifact at a time if browsing through a tag list. This type of feature would aid findability, which is an expressed goal for many developing such tools for patrons as stated earlier. The primary goal in Wayfinder was meaning making, for which a plethora of tags is not necessary, but still helpful since a user must discover artifacts of interest first before making meaning of them. Another helpful discovery feature might display tags to users not only in alphabetical order, but also in a cluster map by general theme. For example, a user looking for examples in the collection of sites that encourage contributions to a campaign may only search for artifacts tagged with the word “contribute.” He would miss at least one example that was tagged “donate” and not “contribute.” Clustering synonymous tags would aid in discovery and help users discover new ideas, or at least new ways to describe a particular feature of interest. Offering a list of existing tags to choose from when tagging might also reduce the number of times a site may be tagged only “donate” and not “contribute,” for example, because a user might recognize both words in the existing list and choose to add both words more often. This would reduce the system’s dependency on the user’s recall of tags already entered, and reduce the dependency on the user’s ability to come up with synonymous tags. An expanded type of list might cluster according to classifications. An example of this type of clustering is the use of the tag “animal” and “dog” in Wayfinder. Discovery is aided for the user when she is searching specifically for artifacts that show pictures of, or mention dogs specifically in some way, but also helps the user who is casting a broader net by looking for artifacts that mention animals in general. Certain tags may be difficult to cluster and lend themselves to several categories. The tag “elephant” was applied only once in Wayfinder to the National Republican Congressional Committee’s site “Stomp 4 Change”. This use of the tag “elephant” could connote “republican-ness” as represented by the party’s symbol, or could also easily fit into an “animal” cluster valuable for a user who may be looking to discover sites with pictures of animals, regardless of the symbolism of the animal in context. These unusual tags that were used only once by taggers may also act as a discovery aid for users by introducing new ideas to the system. A user who is browsing the collection with a particular idea in mind may stumble upon an artifact tagged by another user with an unusual tag such as “elephant.” No matter whether the new user interprets the previous user’s intentions with her “elephant” tag, the new user has discovered a new way to interpret an artifact of interest that may never have been discovered without the aid of the unusual interpretation of a fellow user. Regardless of expertise, this discovery may lead to the production of new knowledge about digital cultural artifacts.
The unusual one-time-use tags in Wayfinder may also be a function of the short period of time in which data was collected, and the limited number of active users. While the number of users did not prohibit an assessment of the role of the interface in Web archiving, it did provide limited data on the interaction between users and the level of influence they had on each other. User satisfaction was not addressed in this initial implementation of Wayfinder. While this implementation was no intended to be a user study, an evaluation of user satisfaction with the tool itself and a more thorough evaluation of user-user influence would have been valuable, and a user survey will be included in future implementations of Wayfinder.
6. THE ROLE OF THE INTERFACE IN DIGITAL CULTURAL HERITAGE Wayfinder is an interface that enables researchers conducting digital scholarship and curators designing Web archives to engage a broader audience of patrons and readers as interpreters and contributors of narratives about archive objects by contributing personal experience to online archive documentation. Wayfinder is an interface that can be used to preserving individual interaction with archived Web artifacts, and interaction between users to socially build understanding of Web culture. Wayfinder is a tool that can offer a range of potential implementations including facilitating public engagement with scholarship, and use as ethnographic research, teaching, and cataloging or coding tools. Wayfinder is a platform from which a range of experts and users can engage in the descriptive processes of Web archiving [18]. By providing access to small, curated collections, users could navigate representations of primary Web sources and compare different narratives describing those objects. Descriptions offered by experts could be evaluated along with non-expert descriptions, each representing different thematic perspectives. I advocate inclusive and experiential means for producing knowledge about Web culture. As digital cultural heritage expands, and more and more artifacts are created (as the pace of self-publishing increases) cultural heritage institutes will need to enlist more help capturing, interpreting, and making accessible Web artifacts. The users who access archived digital culture artifacts can be a valuable resource by increasing the number of potential catalogers; they can also add contextual and experiential interpretation about artifacts that expert catalogers typically do not document. We can preserve the objects, and also preserve the social life of the objects in a collection, a map of the people who shared them, and what ideas they inspired. This work is important because we often overlook the culture of the Web and the unique and creative qualities of Web artifacts that constitute its heritage. We also often overlook the part nonexperts actors can play in knowledge production. Audience
members are not simply receivers, nor are they only community advisors; they have the ability to play an active role in the organization and interpretation of cultural heritage artifacts in a much more detailed and profound way. Because we often fail to see the evolutionary history of cybercultural artifacts, we tend disregard artifacts in cybercultural history in general. The evolution of ephemeral artifacts on the Web becomes the purview of digital scholarship. With the exception of a few projects (e.g., Internet Archive, European Archive, Library of Congress Digital Preservation Program, among others), there are few organized efforts to preserve the Web, and even fewer who aim to qualitatively document the archives they build as collections of cultural heritage. There are projects, such as Hanzoweb (http://www.hanzoweb.com/), that include documentation in steps toward preserving the Web; this social Web archiving project focuses on capturing and preserving the Web through small individual, user-curated and userdocumented collections. This example of a preservation effort is more easily compared to personal information management systems that enable users to organize and archive Web resources of particular interest to them, creating collections of artifacts for which the only common factor tying them together is the individual’s interests. There is no common catalog, other than adhoc user tagging systems, and no boundaries to collections. The information ecology found on the Web requires a merger of these approaches grounded by scholarship but accessible to many in a number of ways that engage audience members actively. Collecting user experience and conceptualization of the artifacts users encounter on the Web, and sharing those experiences with others, enables us to conceive of our experience of media and its impact on our perceptions, values, thought and behavior as cultural heritage. Collecting Web artifacts and the interpretations of the users of those artifacts preserves not only the objects themselves, but also preserves the voices of the people experiencing Web artifacts.
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