Definition of a Research Artefact

Research Artefacts as visualisation

A Research Artefact is an object that serves as a physical (and tangible) visualisation of a set of data values (researcher’s ideas, knowledge, information on a subject, wants etc…) that are personal to the researcher. It visualises a data set of the researcher in a form that is meaning full to them and can be categorised into three types.

Type One: An object that serves as a reminder to pursue and idea, find out more about something.

Type Two: An object that represents the process of an idea as we develop more about it.

Type Three: A representation of something achieved – the end of an idea.

Researchers fill there rooms with these artefacts and the location is not necessarily static. The location of the artefact is important and plays a fundamental part in creating the visualisation of the artefact to the researcher.

Examples of artefacts as visualisation

Researcher A(1) places a temperature sensor in his room. He puts it in his keyboard on his desk to remind him to look and find out how to use it better. In this scenario, the data is participant A wanting to find out more on how to use the temperature sensor and the visualisation is the sensor (as a physical object, not it functioning) and its location in his research space. The artefact is of type one and is providing an indexical representation to the researcher.

Researcher B’s (1) books are placed under categories that form the creation of a book proposal that he is developing. The data is that he wants to read a book called x because of y and the visualisation of this is the post-it notes and physical forms that sit in piles. This artefact is of type 2 and is again is an indexical representation to the researcher.

Objects serving as research artefacts do not usually represent all of the types presented above but, in rare cases they can do. Take for example a book. Looking at the physical object of the book, not the information inside it (the words) it can be a research artefact for all of the three type catagories presented above. In the context of type one, it could represent an artefact as the book object just being in our presence serves as a prompt to read it. In the context of type two, the book object could represent an idea that a researcher is perusing. Finally, in the context of type three, it could represent a project written up and published.

Primer focus

The type of artefact that I am choosing to focus on in my Primer project is Type one through developing symbolic representations. I am interested in looking at a research artefact as a representation of more than one thing, a representation in relation to a series of things.

My next step is to decide what the appropriate mapping would be that I would apply to the research artefact that I am creating. I would like to see this research artefact as an extension of the spatial probes that I have been developing in my linked research project in a sense that the software/artefacts that I create could be used as probes to deploy to the researchers that I have contact with.

Hypothesis:

Abstraction of visualisation is something that is representational only when the methodology is organised and conceptualised by the user. Fundamentally choice and customisation play an important role. I think that I will find that the tool used to create research artefacts may offer an appropriate visualisation for some people but not all. This is down to not everyone being able to relate to everything.

1. Smith.M. The Researchers Archive, Linked Research Project. 2011

Tangible Research Artefacts: Implementing Choice

After exploring the Hemesh processing libraries, I have been experimenting with creating forms and then modifying them. The image below is a screen shot of a sketch that I uploaded onto open processing:

A lot of visualisations, like the one below and those seen in Moere, A.V. and Patel, S. paper (1.) are abstracted representations that require a level of explanation for their meaning to be understood. A researchers connection to his ‘things’ is very emotional and personal, bound by complex relationships so in the context of the Tangible Research Artefacts, the researcher needs to understand what the form means and its representation for it to be a rich resource for them to use. A researchers connection to his ‘things’ is very emotional and personal, bound by complex relationships. I want to make the form transparent in its meaning to the researcher and they can choose to share this meaning with other researchers or hide it to themselves. Therefore, there needs to be some connection between the variables that drive the form and the artefact that is produced. The researcher needs to have a role as being the maker as well as the consumer.

My proposed system for the processing software is to create an environment that associates certain modifier functions (from the Hemesh libraries) to certain attributes of the documents. For example, twisting a shape to represent secrecy. For simplicity, I am first going to focus on just pdf files in the development of my prototype and then build on this complexity.

To create this level of customisation I have been experimenting with creating a GUI (Graphical User Interface). The aim of this is to enable the researcher to quantifiably apply their emotion or feelings to the artefact.

To implement this GUI I have chosen to look at the ControlP5 libraries and I have uploaded some of my experiments onto open processing, an example of which is above.

Refrences

1. Moere, A.V. and Patel, S. 2010. The Physical Visualization of Information: Designing Data Sculptures in an Education Context. In Visual Information Communication, Huang, M.L. et al (Eds.). Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

tanagble research artefacts

Through conversations with academics in my linked research, physical artefacts in research are things that are personal to ourselves that serve as reminders of ideas to pursue, a representation of our current train of thoughts, our ambitions for the future, our achievements of the past amongst many more. How can this narrative seen in these physical artefacts be told of digital artefacts (artefacts being images, e‐books, pdf’s, music) through the creation of a generative physical artefact?

Many people have tried to explore the notion of taking data and representing it through visualisation. Through his work, Dragulecu (iv.) asks questions about how your own personal documents can be translated into “…inhabitable objects…” and even “..transformed into a small Cubist city.” Dragulecu uses his project Spam Plants (iv.) to demonstrate this, where data inputs were translated into variables that drive the creation of petals. The limits of this project however and still the confinements of a screen, relying on visualisation to demonstrate their meaning. A V Moere and S Patel (ii.) propose the concept of a data structure that is a mapping of data in a physical form. However, I feel that their definition of a data sculpture is limited to the context that they experimented in. Tailored Tangible Research Artefacts differs from that which A V Moere and S Patel (ii) propose through the metaphorical representation of the data structure. Whereas the Moere and Patel’s data structures tried to open the black box, my Tailored Tangible Research Artefacts embrace the secrecy of the data structure they create. The secrecy of a researchers artefact can sometimes be what creates its beauty in the researchers eyes. Participant A (iii.) talks about how an attractive feature of his book case is that only he understands the indexical relationship of his books. I want to capture this emotion in my artefact and the poetic nature of this. The narrative of this connection can be portrayed through the personal selection of data sets and the element of customisation within the artefact. The artefact is the researchers own, they created it and it is personally important to them.

To create this secrecy outlined above, personal ownership needs to be present in the mapping of data in three dimensional form so an understanding of the difference between data and information is key:

“…data is the raw material of, its substrate; information is the meaning derived from data in a particular context.”

For Tailored Tangible Research Artefacts to create connections, they need to be able to have a meaning derived from them by the researcher. Can the researcher create an emotional connection with his digital artefacts? Can they express hierarchy of attachment towards digital files in a certain way? In the context of Tailored Tangible Research Artefacts meta data can secretly store information about our associations with information and a system could be used to create a hierarchy of importance and attachment.

Tailored Tangible Research Artefacts are interested in the combination data types that serve an indexical link to the researcher. This could be text, photos or a combination of the two and customisation of this is vital is the researcher is to form an attachment and sense of belonging with the artefact. Looking at the notion of data from empirical science, “Only (data) when organised and contextualised by an observer does this data yield information, a message or meaning”

Data Landscapes

I'd like to share this data-rich piece of research on how a child learns language. The researcher explains how he tracked the way his son learns words from activities within his surrounding social environment by using video analytics tracking the movements of his family members, leaving visual 'interaction traces'.

My interest was in the Data Visualisation and Analysis bits; the minutes 8-11 show the analytical approach by moving time to the vertical axis, and reading the structures of the 'social hotspots' and then tagging the activities that accompanied certain words to figure out the relationships between language learning and social activities. Intensively rich data is visualised in a form of data landscapes that reveal interesting relations.

The video is on TED:

Deb Roy: The birth of a word

http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2011-03-15&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email