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

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

Digital Collections and Humanities

Scholars

• Brockman Palmer, et al., Scholarly Work 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

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

User Assessment

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

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

Emblematica Online

What is an Emblem?

Motto

Pictura

Subscriptio

Peter Isselburg, Emblemata Politica, 1617http://libsysdigi.library.uiuc.edu/OCA/B

ooks2009-10/emblematapolitic00isel/

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

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

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

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)

Usability Study

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

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

Usability Testing

• 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

“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

• 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

• 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

“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

Usability Testing

Usability: Structure of Site

http://emblematica.library.illinois.edu

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

Usability Testing 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

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

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

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

What Works

• 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

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

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

Photo Credits• Measuring Time,” 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 Eiffel Tower // 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,” by Yann, 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 Eduardo Tavares, on Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/e_tavares/3499009813

Emblems

“A parvo confunditur hoste” http://hdl.handle.net/10111/EmblemRegistry:E012420

“Glaubens prob”

http://hdl.handle.net/10111/EmblemRegistry:E000962

"Verstandt Jovi verwandt"

http://hdl.handle.net/10111/EmblemRegistry:E000996

‘Studio et vigilantia’ http://hdl.handle.net/10111/EmblemRegistry:E020608

Harriett Green

English and Digital Humanities Librarian

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

green19@illinois.edu

@greenharr