We tested user data today on the front end of the itinera database website. We got to understand and test out itinera's usability and try to figure out what features help users go through a website smoothly. We also got to go behind the scenes, and put in the data. So we get a look at two different levels of website usage. It was taking what we learned last week to a whole other level.
At first I was like, that's cool, then I read the by-line: "The Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon was an international initiative to bring women's voices to the online encyclopedia--as editors and as subjects" and I was like, nevermind, that's awesome!
Cool! Middlebury made a Summer Institute for Itinera!
Middlebury, Vermont, August 3 - 15, 2014
Deadline: Mar 3, 2014
Summer Institute on Digital Mapping and Art History
Call for Applicants
Middlebury College, Middlebury VT
August 3-15, 2014
What makes this call for applications especially cool is the application process: not a long, complicated series of forms, with character limits, and uploads for your CV, even though you've already put in that information separately in another form, and complicated system messages that will confuse your professors, as they try to upload their references. Just a Google form. (Plus, a stylish hero featuring a slide projector. Very hip.)
When I set off researching Nicholas Revett, I started with the biological information, which turned out to be fairly easy. Despite the fact that the site I was using did not have a death location, everything else was easily attainable and accessible. However, once I started working on the tour stops, it began to be much clearer to me how complex this data is. In regards to Revett, there is a lot of uncertainty, which I didn't think twice about at first. In fact, I kind of expected it.
I thought that the activity we did today was the most fun so far of what we've done here at the Lab. Taking information and figuring how the information fits together like a puzzle piece is so very fascinating. You can't just take the information given to you and write it out. You have to think about it, and understand it first, because historical data is not always one hundred percent sure. People are not infallible and so their reports will not be perfect.
Last Friday we learned about Metadata. If you googled metadata you would find that metadata is data about data. But that's the very simplified, almost incorrect definition. Metadata is the data on how we choose to categorize the data that we collect. That includes where the data comes from, how the data was collected, who the data was collected from, what kind of data it is (primary source or secondary source etc) and how we classify them based on all these factors.
On Friday we learned about metadata, a topic I had never heard of previously, but was nonetheless interesting. I never really thought about what happened when I searched something on Google, or why websites were always asking me to complete random surveys, but now I understand that they fall under the category of collecting data. Metadata, I learned, is not only a large part of research and academia, but it is also very relevant to everyday life.
