Chi-Square Test Non Parametric Test Categorical Variable
User Engagement with Digital Archives: A Case Study of Emblematica Online
1. User Engagement with Digital
Archives: A Case Study of
Emblematica Online
Harriett Green
University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign
Joint CSDH/SCHN and ACH 2015 Conference
June 2, 2015
2. Today’s talk
• Digital collections + user engagement
• Overview of Emblematica Online
• Results of usability study of Emblematica
• What are the future implications for
humanities scholarship with digital collections?
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
3. Digital Collections and Humanities
Scholars
• Brockman Palmer, et al., ScholarlyWork in the
Humanities and the Evolving Information
Environment (CLIR Pub 104)
• Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the ACLS
Commission on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities
and Social Sciences
• Log Analysis of Internet Resources in the Arts
and Humanities Project (LAIRAH)
• Ithaka S+R, Supporting the Changing Research
Practices of… - Art Historians, Historians
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
4. Scholarly Primitives
• Discovering
• Annotating
• Comparing
• Referring
• Sampling
• Illustrating
• Representing
“Software intended to
enable these primitives
should be developed and
tested in the context of real
scholarly use, but it should
resist customization,
because purpose-built or
project-centered software is
unlikely to provide broad
support for functional
primitives.”—John Unsworth
6. Why user studies of digital archives?
“As the web only continues to grow and provide
many alternative information sources for those who
seek them, developing robust strategies not just for
‘passive’ discovery but for ‘active’ outreach may be
called for.”—Ithaka S+R, Appraising Our Digital
Investment
• Build digital collections for increased use
• Ensure ROI on funding
• How?: Connect digital content to actual research
practices
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
7. User Assessment is Necessary
“While a greater reliance and dependency on digital resources is
inevitable, the quality of the data and their organization and
accessibility in service to teaching and scholarship are major
concerns.
“Without the guiding voice of scholars, the tremendous effort
now being devoted to digitizing our cultural heritage could in
fact impede, not facilitate, future research.”
—Charles Henry, The Idea of Order:Transforming Research
Collections for 21st Century Scholarship
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
9. What is an Emblem?
Motto
Pictura
Subscriptio
Peter Isselburg, Emblemata Politica, 1617
http://libsysdigi.library.uiuc.edu/OCA/B
ooks2009-10/emblematapolitic00isel/
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
10. Emblematica Online
• Provides single point of access to
digitized emblem books from libraries in
U.S., Germany, Netherlands, UK
• Funded by a NEH/DFG Bilateral Digital
Humanities grant (2008) and NEH
Humanities Collections and Reference
Resources grant (2013)
http://emblematica.library.illinois.edu
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
11. What’s in Emblematica?
• Nearly 1400 emblem books
• 23,420 individual emblems
• Books digitized from the collections of the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
HAB Wolfenbüttel, University of Utrecht,
University of Glasgow, Duke University and
the Getty Institute
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
http://emblematica.library.illinois.edu
12. Collaboration for Digital Special
Collections
“Any assumption that the construction of digital
libraries and digital library services can be left
solely in the hands of librarians and
technologists is naïve, at least in the domain of
digitized Early Modern emblem literature.”
—Peter Daly (2002)
14. Goals of Study
• Gain further insights into research practices of
humanities scholars
• Learn about behaviors of researchers working
with Emblematica Online and similar
specialized digital archives
• Gather input to assess the new functionalities
added to Emblematica Online, and determine
future functionalities
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
15. User Assessment Study
Interviews
• 10 semi-structured
interviews
• Subjects: graduate
students and scholars at
University of Illinois, HAB
Wolfenbüttel, and Society
for Emblem Studies
• English, art history, medieval
studies, musicology,
linguistics
UsabilityTesting
• 5 usability testing sessions:
Protocol developed from
interviews
• Subjects: Graduate
students and faculty
members from the
University of Illinois
• Primarily from departments
of English and Theatre
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
16. “I could imagine sending students to work with an
emblem alongside an analysis of a passage. I think it
would be interesting with short texts like sonnets, or
could be used with Shakespeare’s plays which sometimes
have emblematic episodes in them.” —Faculty
“The first thing is to have consciousness on how to
produce their own research. So it’s training them to be
able to use that language, to be able to check the
collection, to find information important to their
work.”—Faculty
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
17. • New methods for researching archival content
• To look up specific emblems
• Expand interdisciplinary research via new
sources of content such as emblems
“[Emblematica Online] could help students and
researchers get across multi-lingual barriers
because it is a multi-lingual tradition and visual
tradition. It can also help pioneer searches that
begin as visual and verbal searches.” —Faculty
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
18. • Digitized emblem books enable access to
archives
• Enhance skills in early modern languages,
incorporate visual culture and theory
“I look at archival sources, account books,
buildings, architectural treatises, musical
treatises, but this is another sphere, another
realm so to speak that could be used to
gather more information.” —Faculty
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
19. “And even just making emblems more available may
promote scholarship on emblems. Some people
otherwise, like me, who haven’t really researched them or
written about them may just poke around in this
resource and find something that draws them to it.”
“I would return to the point of [Emblematica Online] not
being bound by a single national tradition or a single
library collection. I think that, in and of itself, may allow
people to draw on a broader range of sources than they
otherwise would.That can show itself in the scholarship
that gets produced on the topic.”
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
21. Usability: Structure of Site
http://emblematica.library.illinois.edu
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
22. UsabilityTesting on Structure
• Finding the link from the opening page to the
search interface
• Navigation with tabs
• How can we make digital collections
“readable” so that researchers can navigate
them intuitively, almost as well as a book or
article?
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
23. Discovery
• Include search fields and
limiters similar to other
popular humanities e-
resources, such as Early
English Books Online
• A legend to explain the
meaning of specialized
terms
• Use broader, not more
esoteric terms for
navigation and interface of
digital archive
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
24. Discovery Tools:When Do they Help?
“If I kept clicking these
narrower categories, and
ended up with some kind
of unexpected but
somehow relevant images,
it would be a big perk of
using this database.”
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
25. Interactivity with Content
“We’re increasingly attracted to and depend on and
have wonderful new opportunities of working with this
material in digital formats, and because it does help
preserve the actual material books, but it’s nice to be
reminded of that materiality in the way it’s presented
visually.”—Faculty
“When we zoomed in, that was just beautiful, and that
you can see hand markings and other pencil markings
that would be on there…. For me as a researcher, that
matters and I loved the quality of that.”
—Graduate Student
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
26. WhatWorks
• Quality of scanned images
• Breadth of digitized emblem books and
content
• Draws content from multiple libraries
• Easy access to the digital collections
• Uniqueness of the emblem collections and
potential for interdisciplinary research use
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
27. Functionalities to Add
• Bibliographic information on editions and
multiple volumes
• Annotation tool
• Improve search interface with more search
filter and faceting
• Include background information that provides
more of a historical context for the works
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
28. Future Impact of Digital Collections on
Humanities Scholarship?
• Potential to advance Interdisciplinarity in
humanities scholarship
• Expand scholarly communications across fields
of inquiry
• Innovative pedagogical approaches
• How could the digital and print complement
each other and interact in new ways?
@greenharr green19@illinois.edu
29. Photo Credits
• MeasuringTime,” by aussiegall, on Flickr,
https://www.flickr.com/photos/aussiegall/286709039
• brick detail by Grant MacDonald, on Flickr,
https://www.flickr.com/photos/grantmac/2578109298
• "classroom” by Lauren Manning, on Flickr,
https://www.flickr.com/photos/laurenmanning/2318943806
• "More Bildsten notebooks” by Jonas Lowgren, on Flickr,
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonas_lowgren/7406596056
• "Paris: telescope on EiffelTower //Teleskop auf dem Eiffelturm” by brongaeh, on Flickr,
https://www.flickr.com/photos/brongaeh/9933790456
• "Cock the Hammer,” by Kyle May, on Flickr,
https://www.flickr.com/photos/kylemay/1430449350
• "Question Box,” by Raymond Bryson, on Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/f-
oxymoron/9647972522
• "38/365 Puzzled,” by Mykl Roventine, on Flickr,
https://www.flickr.com/photos/myklroventine/3261364899
• "Puzzle pieces – 2,” byYann, on Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/yannconz/2796311194
• "Tunnel of black” by Shemsu.Hor, on Flickr,
https://www.flickr.com/photos/shemsu_hor/14814306629
• "Dam Gears” by EduardoTavares, on Flickr,
https://www.flickr.com/photos/e_tavares/3499009813
