Abstract—“Exploring the crossroads of linguistic diversity: language contact in Southeast Asia” is an interdisciplinary project with a disparate team of 11 researchers from linguistics, art, design and media. A range of digital assets in different formats, including publications, films and datasets, were created from the fieldwork and research done. Using this project as a case study, this paper seeks to explore an approach on how digital assets from an interdisciplinary research project can be captured, preserved and (re)presented in a form of a digital archive. It results in a digital archive with dedicated views for each type of digital asset to meet specific viewing needs. It also used a modular design approach to achieve flexibility and meet the knowledge transfer objectives of the research project.
2. How can I document
and promote my
research?
Where and how can I
store my research
output?
How can I allow
others to reuse my
research?
How can others
access my research
even after research
grant is completed?
3. 0.03%
1951
AMOUNT OF PAPERS WITH
“INTERDISCIPLINAR*”
IN TITLE (%)
6.66%
2015
Source: Web of Science
Total Records Found = 15,142
1.36%
1991
0.07%
1965
2.26%
2004
9. Image: Cover of nature’s special issue on
INTERDISCIPLINARITY by Dean Trippe
10. DIHA
Project Home
Publication Film Dataset
Listing of
Records
Record Details
Exhibition Resources
Listing of
Digital Assets
INFORMATION
STRUCTURE
11. • The design of the interface should allow or encourage
exploration, access and reuse of the digital assets by
different groups of users.
• Each type of digital asset should be characterised and
described with specific metadata structure, and best
presented using digital tools.
• The navigational structure of the archive should be easily
understood.
• Researchers or administrators can make improvements to
the digital archive whenever needed.
DESIGN
CONSIDERATIONS
26. Images:
Viktor Vorobyev and Danil Polshin via Noun Project
Modular design for
interdisciplinary projects:
• Leveraging on the
capabilities of Wordpress
and digital platforms to
(re)present content
• Creating dedicated views to
suit specific viewing needs
• Ease of adding/editing
content
28. USING BLOGS TO (RE)PRESENT RESEARCH
v.1.0
KEY ACTIVITY
BLOG TYPES
APPROACH
ADD-ONS
LEGEND
INDIRECT BRANCH
DIRECT BRANCH
ONLINE
EXHIBITION
DIGITAL
COLLECTION
INFO VISUAL
LAYERS
ACADEMIC
BLOG
ONLINE
SERIAL
PUBLICATION
DIGITAL
ARCHIVE
RESEARCH
PROFILE
LIVING
PUBLICATION
PROJECT
DOCUMENTAT
-ION
MAP OF
RESEARCH
VISUAL
CV
ALTMETRICS
RESEARCH
CLUSTER
PORTFOLIO
ISSN
APPLICATION
AFFLIATION
DIGITAL
SHOWCASE
DIGITAL
STORYTELLING
DIGITAL
CURATION
How can I document and promote my research?
Where and how can I store my research output?
How can I allow others to reuse my research?
How can others access my research even after research grant is completed?
The following are some of the questions that researchers are asking when conducting their research. The research environment is constantly evolving, bringing in new trends to disseminate, document, transmit and visualise research.
And in recent years, be it based on figures or by observations, there have been a significant rise in interdisciplinary projects (or projects becoming interdisciplinary). Here you can see a chart showing some evidence from Web of Science. A search in the citation database indicated that the number of papers mentioning “interdisciplinarity” or similar terms in the titles has increased significantly over the years, especially in the last 10 years. The increase reflected the priorities of funding agencies in interdisciplinary research.
Hence, this brings me here to share with you on this topic on digital archiving for interdisciplinary knowledge transfer.
Something about myself. For the past couple of years in NTU, I have been working quite a bit with faculty and schools to develop different types of digital collections or archives. They ranged from collections of digitalised materials to visual repositories of student works. Each of the digital archive were unique with different requirements and objectives.
Considerations for designing the digital archive can be determined through the concepts of knowledge and knowledge transfer. While information are pieces of understandable or interpreted data, knowledge connects the pieces of information together. And knowledge transfer is to connect the researchers (or their research outputs) to those who needed it – academically or strategically. Understanding the following concepts helped to frame the design requirements of the digital archive. It sort of helps to frame the requirements of the digital archive by thinking about the impact of research and how different group of users can benefit from the content presented.
Considerations for designing the digital archive can be determined through the concepts of knowledge and knowledge transfer. While information are pieces of understandable or interpreted data, knowledge connects the pieces of information together. And knowledge transfer is to connect the researchers (or their research outputs) to those who needed it – academically or strategically. Understanding the following concepts helped to frame the design requirements of the digital archive. It sort of helps to frame the requirements of the digital archive by thinking about the impact of research and how different group of users can benefit from the content presented.
In this presentation, I would like to share an approach that focused on the a digital archiving for a project with an interdisciplinary nature. I will be using one of our ongoing projects as the case study to discuss, that is the a digital archive for the research project, entitled “Exploring the crossroads of linguistics diversity: language contact in SEA”.
As mentioned earlier by Halina/Frantisek in their presentations earlier, this project brings together researchers from various disciplines, such as linguistics, design, art, media, and the library, where they applied different research methodologies to create different types of digital assets for the project.
The digital assets, which include publications, photographs, films, interview videos with annotations, transcripts and source files, and digital images of textile collections, had different requirements in terms of storage, description and presentation.
While designing the digital archive, we have made the following key considerations. [Run through the points]
We decided to adopted a modular approach to design the interdisciplinary digital archive. This allowed us to prioritize content without deprecating design. Instead of applying a generic template or page layout to fit all content, each digital asset were looked into separately, broken down, and determine how best to present each of them.
Let’s now looked at the screenshots of the digital archive.
The project digital archive was built and hosted on blogs@NTU, a Wordpress-based campus-wide online publishing platform in NTU. It was created as a sub-site under the DIHA research cluster website. As shown here is the project homepage. It contains a short description of the project and the people involved. From here, viewers can navigate to the different digital assets from the top menu bar.
Each project asset is added using a form. Depending of the format of the asset, specific fields can be set to gather the necessary information specific to each type. As it is important that each asset is best represented, we can also create a customised post using the page builder and link it to the record.
Here you can see the difference between two layouts. A default layout that can be applied to different assets on the left, and a customised layout on the right.
Customised pages can be created using a page builder, where visual elements can be added or edited quickly.
Next, besides layout, we have also looked at how content can be presented using digital platforms or tools. For example, this is a exhibition digital asset. It shows details of the exhibition as well as where it was held.
Videos are uploaded to a designated YouTube account and embedded to page, while a 360° image, taken using a RICOH camera can be embedded using their viewer. In this case, it is the exhibition held at the ArtScience Museum Singapore in May this year.
Publications on the other hand was uploaded to ISSUU, a digital publishing platform and embedded to the page.
The digital platform allows viewers to read the publication like a book by “flipping the pages” on fullscreen.
Here is an example of how a dataset can be displayed. In this case, it is a collection of video interviews conducted in the Abui Tribe. Users can filter by specific fields entered into each video record.
Here is the record page of a video. It contains the basic descriptive details, transcripts in three languages and the source files where other scholars or linguists can download to conduct their own analysis.
Overall, the digital archive was built as:
A digital preservation platfor, a container, to allow on-going management of the digital assets in different formats for current and future access
An exhibition artefact, where it can be used to complement a physical exhibition with more in-depth information on the subject matter or individual digital assets. Each digital asset page can be standalone.
An informational website, where it can be used as a outreach tool to inform and educate users on the research project as the whole
The interdisciplinary nature of the research project as shared presents characteristics for similar research in intangible heritage or humanities. The project served as an experimental purpose where the design of the digital archive is constantly evolving. Adopting a modular approach allows us to strike a balance between design and presentation of content. We moved away from a “one-size-fit-all” kind of approach to a flexible approach to allow each information component of the digital archive to be optimised or edited independently of other components. This was achieved this by leveraging on the capabilities of Wordpress, providing options for customised views to be created, and using a mashup of different digital tools to optimise viewing experiences.
A digital archive should not only be about preservation, documentation and showcase. It is also about how it can create opportunities to encourage scholarship of a particular topic. As the content in digital archive grows, added emphasis should be placed on relationship among content and people, such as creating thematic paths between different digital assets,…
.. And developing researcher profiles to consolidate research contributions and impact.
There are also a lot of digital tools out there to visualise or create new ways to explore contents. Here is just a small fraction. For example, I have used the a simple timeline tool in this digital archive to present the content with a timeline. Such simple add-ons provide an alternative ways for viewers to explore content in the digital databases.
There are more complex tools, like this Palladio by Stanford University, which provides an opportunity to to visualise relationships among project assets and outputs, which could be could be geographical, temporal, conceptual, or all of the above. One example application could be to map the movements of languages. These visualisations, or what I called visual layers, can allow viewers alternative ways to explore research content to obtain their own insights.
That’s all I have.
Here is an example of a research methodology of Frantisek as a linguist.
And here is the methodology of Astrid as a information visualization designer.
And here is the information structure. From the main site, you can access a listing of DIHA projects that are ongoing or completed.
A project can have a sub-site where it contains the assets generated from the project. Each asset will have their own post or page that contain the details. Here you can see that Wordpress can be used to create many different layers of content.
This project was conducted as part of DIHA, which is short for Digital Intangible Heritage of Asia. It is a research cluster at the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in NTU. Collectively, the cluster consists of projects that bring people from different disciplines together, such as linguists, designers, computer engineers, etc. It focuses on the conversation, interpretation and the access of knowledge generated, which is one of the main reasons behind having a digital archive.