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Subject on a Small Scale:Home-grown vocabularies

Judy Weedman

Professor

San Jose State University

VRA + ARLIS/NA

March 2011

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Research project on vocabulary design

Rich design literature in other disciplines

Growing attention in the field of LIS

o Encyclopedia of Library & Information Sciences, 3rd ed.

o JASIST 2009. Perspectives on Design: Information Technologies and Creative Practices

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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

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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)

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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

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Structure

» Post coordinate 7

» Precoordinate 14

» Classification 10

» Natural language 3

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Structure by creation date

Classification

o 1914 -- 2003 (median 1984)

Precoordinate

o 1916, 1917 – 2003 (median 1976)

Postcoordinate

o 1986 -- 2000 (median 1996)

Natural language only (database or imagebase)

o 1999

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Subject

Of and about / literal and interpretive

o 18 vocabularies

Literal only

o 16 vocabularies

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Existing vocabularies considered?

Don’t know: 11

No: 5

Yes: 18

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

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When existing vocabularies were used

Some terms incorporated as appropriate: 6

Based new vocabulary on: 1

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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

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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

o Creating something that does not already exist (Schon, Bucciarelli)

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UNCERTAINTY Wicked problems (Rittel & Webber)

o Ill-defined, messy, and aggressive

o There is no definitive definition of a wicked problem

o No stopping rule -- you never know if you’re done

o No ultimate test – you never know if you’re right

o Solutions are not true-or-false but good-or-bad (or better-or-worse)

o Every wicked problem is essentially unique

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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.”

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Uncertainty in my studies

Multiplicity of relationships between images

o Language represents the relationships between items in a collection

o Attributes shared that are useful for aggregation, and attributes used to discriminate the relevant from the irrelevant

Specificity

o How far do you go?

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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.

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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

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(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.

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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.

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Problem setting

How the problem is defined determines the solution

o problem-solvers choose “whether to have a problem or not, and the specification of what constitutes the problem” (Lave)

o 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)

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Problems do not present themselves to practitioners as givens. They must be constructed from the materials of the situation. When we set the problem, we interactively name the things to which we will attend and frame the context in which we will attend to them (Schon).

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The respondents said…

To make the existing vocabulary smaller (to preserve the original intellectual work while increasing usability)

To allow a professor and his graduate students to answer particular kinds of research questions

To meet the needs of studio artists as well as art historians

To meet the information needs of the entire university (sociologists, historians, English literature specialists) when the art library was incorporated into the university library

To spend grant money

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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)

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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.

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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.”

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

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Constraints

Not only “limitations”

Rather, what is seen as a given … or a goal … or an opportunity

Contribute to problem definition

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Constraints in my studies

Literary warrant

User warrant

o “Vocabulary design is creative, but it’s constrained by the way people expect to find things.”

Standards warrant

o “*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

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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

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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.

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In this report

Uncertainty

Problem-setting

Conversations with materials

Constraints

Nature of design as a kind of intellectual work

o Creativity

o Emotion

o Relationship to domain

o What is actually being designed?

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The respondents said…

1. 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

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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.

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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.

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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

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5. Relationshiop to the domain changes

o The other very satisfying part about it was, I was learning more about the subject area … a whole new language and area of expertise.

o 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?

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The biggest insight for me…

6. The importance of structure

o I started to like form as much as content.

o It appeals to my sense of order … it pleases me when things fall into place.

o 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.

o Don’t get misled by content; build structure

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o I like pulling things apart and putting them back together.

o 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.

o [The goal is to] create a syndetic structure to get people from one place to another.

o I spent a good bit of time on trying to have some form of syntax. …This was one of the most difficult parts

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Subject on a small scale

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How Buildings Learn

Stewart Brand, 1994

All buildings are predictions.

All predictions are wrong.

Only buildings that can learn, live.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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

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