This document summarizes an ethnographic study conducted by Northwestern University researchers to understand how humanities scholars use audio and video collections in their research. The researchers observed scholars in context, had them keep diaries of their work, and interviewed them. They found that scholars use many different tools for accessing, analyzing, and annotating media and struggle with issues like locating files and a lack of training. The researchers plan to recruit more participants and use the findings to improve the Avalon media repository software.
1. Researching Researchers:
Avalon Media System's
Ethnographic Study of Media Repository
Usage at Northwestern University
Deborah Cane, Repository Community Manager
Northwestern University
Carolyn Caizzi, Head of Repository and Digital Curation
Northwestern University
Open Repositories 2016
June 14, 2016
2. What is Avalon?
Avalon Media System enables libraries and
archives to easily curate, distribute and provide
online access to their a/v collections for
purposes of teaching, learning and research.
3. What is Avalon?
Open source software system currently directed
by Indiana University & Northwestern University
Hydra Solution Bundle
4. What is Avalon?
• Avalon’s Product Goals:
– Easily installable and configurable
– Serve a variety of use cases and institutions
– Create a basis for sustainable development
5. Project Funding
• 2010 – 2011: IMLS Planning Grant
• 2011-2015: National Leadership Grant from
the Institute of Museum and Library Services
• 2015-2016: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
6. Goals of current Mellon grant
1. Develop additional Avalon functionality
2. Conduct studies of use of audio and video
collections by humanities researchers
3. Develop and implement a community-funded
business and governance model
4. Deploy Avalon in a hosted SaaS model for
testing/pilot
7. Overview
• Brief Background
• Why ETHNOGRAPHIC research?
• Our research methods
• Early results
• Lessons Learned Thus Far
9. Why this research matters to Avalon:
OUTREACH
• Communicating the value of Avalon for
research to potential Avalon adopters.
• Distinguishing Avalon from other solutions
that do not speak to research use cases.
10. Why this research matters to Avalon:
DEVELOPMENT
• User research will help us ensure that future
features fit media researchers’ needs.
– Personas
– Use Cases
– Understanding competing products
14. Why ethnographic research for
software?
Ethnography is the social equivalent of
usability testing. Where usability is
about how people directly interact with
a technology in the more traditional
sense, ethnography is about how people
interact with each other.
As UX designers, we’re primarily
concerned with how we can use such
research to solve a problem through the
introduction or revision of technology.
-Nathanael Boehm
17. Uncover issues users have, both with technology they
employ and with the research technology is supposed to
aid.
User Research Methodology
CONTEXUAL INQUIRY
18. User Research Methodology
CONTEXUAL INQUIRY
The key differentiator between
contextual inquiry and other user
research methods is that
contextual inquiry occurs in
context.
It’s not simply an interview, and
it’s not simply an observation.
It involves observing people
performing their tasks and
having them talk about what
they are doing while they are
doing it.
21. User Research Methodology
CONTEXUAL INQUIRY
Project
Description
Goals for
today
Media
Media Used
(Formats)
Experience
Issues
Applications
App Used
Experience
Issues
Equipment
Equipment
Used
Experience
Issues
24. User Research Methodology
DIARY STUDY
Participants are given a diary to record and describe
aspects of their lives that are relevant to a product or
service.
Diary studies are typically longitudinal and can only be
done for data that is easily recorded by participants.
A different way to capture life and the work of the same
subjects as it is and not how it looks in a controlled
setting.
27. Study Results
For scholars of all levels: More importance is put on content and accessing it,
less on interface.
They will use whatever player/tool is available to access the
film/music/footage they need for their project.
28. Study Results
No one uses just one tool while accessing and researching media.
Ripping
HandBrake
MakeMKV
Viewers
Adobe Suite
iMovie
Preview
QuickTime Player
YouTube
Note Taking
Handwritten notes
(legal pad/scraps of paper)
TextEdit
Writing
Google Docs
KeyNote
Microsoft Word
Pages
Scrivener
Collecting/Citing
External Hard Drive
DropBox
EndNote
Zotero
“My computer is particularly slow, I
should restart it, but I have too many
documents open.”
30. Study Results
COMMON FRUSTRATIONS USING MEDIACOMMON FRUSTRATIONS USING MEDIA for SCHOLARSHIP:
Lack of training in technology for research needs.
“I should really learn how to use iMovie properly but I don’t
have the time and my research budget doesn’t allow for taking a
class.” (Tenure Track Study Participant, Northwestern)
“I was looking for something else for my research and I found
this program to use.” (Graduate Student Participant,
Northwestern)
“I rely on my techie-friends and students to help me when I get
stuck.” (Visiting Professor Participant, Northwestern)
36. From Our Mellon Grant Proposal:
• The proposed user research will be multi-method,
though primarily ethnographic in character:
• Identify at least two disciplines for focus, such as
music theory, ethnomusicology, or film studies.
• Conversations with these researchers will enable us to
select a set of researchers for focus who represent a
wide range of media research use cases and are
willing to work with us during the grant.
39. Next Steps
Fall 2016: 10 new participants
Winter 2017: Written report with
final observations
On-going: Use cases, personas,
functionality and feature justification
40. We’re listening…
Deborah Cane
Repository Community Manager
deborah.cane@northwestern.edu
Carolyn Caizzi
Head of Repository and Digital Curation
carolyn.caizzi@northwestern.edu
Editor's Notes
The Avalon Media System is an open source system, developed by the libraries at Indiana University Bloomington and Northwestern University, for managing and providing access to large collections of digital audio and video. The freely available system enables libraries and archives to easily curate, distribute and provide online access to their collections for purposes of teaching, learning and research.
The Avalon community is made up of a dozen educational, media and open-technology institutions and the project is funded in part by a two-year grant from The Andrew W . Mellon Foundation.
One of the major motivations for the Avalon project has been to support the needs of humanities
researchers for access to and use of time‐based media from library and archive collections. In the initial IMLS grant, much of the user
research underlying Avalon system development focused on instructional use cases rather than
research use cases. One important goal of this Mellon project is to fill out the Avalon requirements and implementation such that the system offers robust
support for humanities scholarship. Thirty years of interactive software development have shown that the
best way to develop useful software is to develop with users, not just for users, so we asked our community manager as part of the Mellon grant to design and conduct an ethnographic study of humanities scholars. Debs will now discuss some of the early findings, themes and potential user stories, and she will also provide a current assessment of our ethnographic study focusing on process, product and participation in case you are inspired to go home and do one of your very own studies!
One of the major motivations for the Avalon project has been to support the needs of humanities researchers for access to and use of time-‐based media from library and archive collections. Even in the early pilot phases of Avalon, the system was used to provide remote researcher access to restricted media content digitized from the IU Moving Image Archive. However, much of the user research underlying Avalon system development has focused on instructional use cases rather than research use cases.
Thus one important goal of this project is to fill out the Avalon requirements and implementation such that the system offers robust support for humanities scholarship. As detailed in the previous section, the team already has sufficient information from researchers and the librarians and archivists who support them to identify many of the features required. However, it is not sufficient to know “what” to build; it is also necessary to know “how” the features need to work and how they should be integrated with other systems and features. Thirty years of interactive software development have shown that the best way to develop useful software is to develop with users, not just for users.
Participants put up with
non-ideal conditions when working with media, because of the lack of extant and accurate historical content.