Judy Weedman presentation for "More Than Meets the Eye? Retrieving Art Images by Subject" session at VRA + ARLIS/NA 2nd joint conference in Minneapolis, MN.

1. Subject on a Small Scale:Home-grown vocabularies Judy Weedman Professor San Jose State University VRA + ARLIS/NA March 2011

2. Research project on vocabulary design Rich design literature in other disciplines Growing attention in the field of LIS Encyclopedia of Library & Information Sciences, 3rd ed. JASIST 2009. Perspectives on Design: Information Technologies and Creative Practices

3. Method Emails posted to five professional listservs, asking for people who used locally designed vocabularies for images to participate in the study 34 usable responses Questionnaires: descriptive information about the vocabulary Interviews: with the 15 respondents who had designed or done extensive maintenance/revision of the vocabularies

4. The collections 1 aquarium - events 1 scientific research center - medicine 1 city government - history (local) 1 newspaper - events, ethnic 1 commissioned photograph - history (urban contemporary) collection 1 personal research collection - eclectic 2 indexes - 1 religion, 1 art 4 historical societies - 2 history local, 1 history (ethnic) 1 history (architecture)

5. 4 museums- art, arch/arch/sci, media, local 6 public libraries - “pictures,” maps, photos, local, history ethnic, posters 12 university libraries - 3 architecture - 1 architectural history - 2 art & architecture - 3 art - 1 art history - 1 history (ethnic) - medieval manuscripts -1 scientific research center

7. Precoordinate 14

8. Classification 10

10. Subject Of and about / literal and interpretive 18 vocabularies Literal only 16 vocabularies

11. Existing vocabularies considered? Don’t know: 11 No: 5 Yes: 18

12. Considered Australian Pictorial Thesaurus Flint & Berry (Aus.) Fogg Art Museum Classif. Index of Christian Art Medical Subject Headings National Art Library Sears List of Subject Hdgs Union List of Artist Names Thesaurus of Geog. Names Yale Center for British Art LC TGM -- 2 Chenhall’s -- 2 Simons-Tansey -- 2 Similar organizations -- 3 ICONCLASS -- 3 Art & Architecture Thesaurus -- 3 LC Subject Headings -- 6

13. When existing vocabularies were used Some terms incorporated as appropriate: 6 Based new vocabulary on: 1

14. Why were standard vocabularies not adopted? Vocabulary too general; terms not specific enough for collection: 6 Terms not specific enough for some parts of collection (non-Western art, modern art): 2 Vocabulary too specific; didn’t fit this collection: 1 Vocabulary too large: 2 Designed for text; didn’t fit images: 1 Worked for objects; didn’t fit subject: 1 Just didn’t fit the slides: 1 Required too much domain knowledge for non-expert catalogers : 2 Didn’t fit queries posed by users : 3 Technical difficulties accessing online: 2

15. DESIGN THEORY Design is the fundamental professional activity – taking a problem situation and creating a solution (Simon) Uncertainty is the key characteristic of design work Creating something that does not already exist (Schon, Bucciarelli)

16. UNCERTAINTY Wicked problems (Rittel & Webber) Ill-defined, messy, and aggressive There is no definitive definition of a wicked problem No stopping rule -- you never know if you’re done No ultimate test – you never know if you’re right Solutions are not true-or-false but good-or-bad (or better-or-worse) Every wicked problem is essentially unique

17. Ability to live with uncertainty Attfield, Blandford, and Dowell assert that the “ability to live with uncertainty [about relevant problems and possible solutions] is an important personal quality for a designer” Schon: “running the maze changes the maze.”

18. Uncertainty in my studies Multiplicity of relationships between images Language represents the relationships between items in a collection Attributes shared that are useful for aggregation, and attributes used to discriminate the relevant from the irrelevant Specificity How far do you go?

19. The respondents said… You can be sure of yourself [but only] within a certain level of tolerance. There are lots of different things you can do. Things aren’t perfect. It depends on the person. Some people can handle a lot more potential trouble than others can. It boils down to ‘how much trouble are you willing to get in?’ you can work something to death, to make sure. …[But] I’m more interested in [getting stuff done]. I’m too old to get anxious about it.

20. I sometimes wonder if it’s just my personal idea of how you interpret a work. It’s always going to be subjective to some degree. [And] we don’t know what subjects are going to be important in the future. [But this also] makes it more interesting to make the decisions. This was much harder [than cataloging] because I couldn't just go to a thesaurus and pick a term, [where] they would already have the broader and narrower terms in there, and I would at least have something to make a decision with. But trying to develop that as

21. (continued) well as the anxiety of not knowing exactly what I was looking at [new subject domain] – yeah, [the anxiety] was fairly high. But as much as I might have fretted about certain terms, I just had to live with the anxiety. You’ve gotta make a decision and move on. …As much as you may not like to do that, you’ll never get anything done if you don’t.

22. Part of [living with the uncertainty] was knowing that, or hoping that, eventually, if it is wrong or if it does need to be different, we’ll get some feedback and be able to do it. There is an expectation of continued evolution of the system – when we need it, we’ll put it in.

23. Problem setting How the problem is defined determines the solution problem-solvers choose “whether to have a problem or not, and the specification of what constitutes the problem” (Lave) The specification of what constitutes the problem determines what we will treat as the relevant aspects of the situation and the boundaries of our attention to it, and imposes upon it a coherence(Schon)

25. Conversation with the materials Interdependence of knowledge and action – action changes your knowledge, changed knowledge leads to additional or different actions (Keller & Keller) Professionals engage in a conversation with the design materials – each action has unexpected as well as expected consequences – the materials talk back, and the designer in return responds to the backtalk (Schon)

26. The respondents said… Vocabularies talk back Arranging and re-arranging terms to see the relationships which resulted. Adding a new image to those previously considered often shifted the existing the relationships, requiring different configurations to accommodate new possibilities. Creation of a new term can affect the scope of the first.

27. An established term would create one relationship, but then some items would need to be disaggregated because they differed in some critical dimension. Designers often considered the effects of using one term or set of terms to express relationships, then changed the terms and relationships to see what the result was. One respondent said that he designed vocabularies in the same way that he baked bread, through experimentation – “I try things and then respond in accordance with what’s happening.”

28. You have to be willing to mess with things, willing to change.

29. Constraints Not only “limitations” Rather, what is seen as a given … or a goal … or an opportunity Contribute to problem definition

30. Constraints in my studies Literary warrant User warrant “Vocabulary design is creative, but it’s constrained by the way people expect to find things.” Standards warrant “[Knowing a standard vocabulary like] AAT directs you to what is important in the image – it helps you see what it is and where it fits in a hierarchy.” Time, money, expertise of staff

31. The nature of the intellectual work of design Today many design theorists see the unexpected as the source of or opportunity for creativity. In the early stages of design work, Schon found very fluid activities that often resulted in surprise and learning Learning often results in reframing the problem

32. We often think of design and creativity as processes that occur within the mind of an individual Schon found that, to the contrary, designing is almost always a social process, with constraints and affordances arising from colleagues, the customer or imagined user, funding agencies, management structures, designers of the technologies the designer uses, distributors of materials, and so on.

33. In this report Uncertainty Problem-setting Conversations with materials Constraints Nature of design as a kind of intellectual work Creativity Emotion Relationship to domain What is actually being designed?

34. The respondents said… There are many conversations Sometimes the “conversation with materials” is with the context as much as the vocabulary – interactions with developers of the organization’s website and content management system, new collections someone would like to add have effects on the vocabulary, the incorporation of XML, each element affecting the others in various ways There is also a conversation with the canon, the standards, in the professional knowledge base

35. 2. Design work is different in nature from other parts of one’s job Requiring creativity, making something that hadn’t existed before Seeing things (in images) in relation to one another An intuitive dimension, a sense of how things should go together, and when a relationship doesn’t feel right.

36. 3. Design work is creative The creative part has to do with putting yourself in the mind of people who are going to be using the materials The creative part also is in seeing the vocabulary options, and deciding that none of the options match what is really in that image, and you have to add something else.

37. 4. Emotion plays a part For some, not all, of the respondents Sometimes unexpected, as in the discovery of slave records in a historical collection Sometimes in the form of curiosity about “how things could be brought together into a structure” Both anxiety and deep satisfaction Emotion also as a negative factor; one’s response to images could get in the way of subject analysis

38. 5. Relationshiop to the domain changes The other very satisfying part about it was, I was learning more about the subject area … a whole new language and area of expertise. Since doing this project, I’m much more aware of photographs in the newspaper than I ever was before… I always put myself in the context of [analyzing] what is this photographer trying to say?

39. The biggest insight for me… 6. The importance of structure I started to like form as much as content. It appeals to my sense of order … it pleases me when things fall into place. It requires relating things to other things, rather than looking at [them] as individual objects. It also requires being curious and wondering how individual elements might be combined. Don’t get misled by content; build structure

40. I like pulling things apart and putting them back together. The big goal is to find a way to relate [the materials to each other]. [We have] very different kinds of materials that are all related to the same place and the same story. [The goal is to] create a syndetic structure to get people from one place to another. I spent a good bit of time on trying to have some form of syntax. …This was one of the most difficult parts

41. Subject on a small scale

42. How Buildings Learn Stewart Brand, 1994 All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong. Only buildings that can learn, live.

43. Vernacular architecture grows directly out of the materials available, responds to the environment, culture, ways of living. Vernacular remodeling tells much about what worked once that doesn’t now. Is often done by non-experts.

44. As uses change, walls are built, knocked down, moved, windows are added or removed. If the design prevents change, the building will die. Small buildings are dramatically cheaper to build and to maintain – and to change … Small invites the metamorphosis of growth.

45. Adaptivity is a fine-grained process. You cannot predict or control it. All you can do is make room for it.

46. Polite architecture could learn much from vernacular architecture, when the goal is a building that will be popular and used as well as beautiful and clever.

47. How Vocabularies Learn? Change over time, adapt to new purposes, pieces fall into ruin, other pieces provide structure for unanticipated uses Respond to their inhabitants and their remodelers Standards inform local practice, the “vernacular” of vocabulary design, and the vernacular informs the design of standards