Feinberg, M., Geisler, G., Whitworth, E., & Clark, E. (2012). Understanding Personal Digital Collections: An Interdisciplinary Exploration. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2012), 200-209.
Once undertaken primarily by museum professionals, the activity of curatorship has been popularized via the Web. Social media tools, such as YouTube playlists and Pinterest Web bulletin boards, enable users to curate a diverse range of materials for personal use and for broader publication. But what makes one set of “curated” items more interesting than another? In this paper, we show how findings from an initial humanistic inquiry led to a lab-based user experiment, and how combined insights from these studies have illuminated new research streams in both humanistic and design research modes.
Crow, J., Broussard, R., Dong, L., Finn, J., Wiley, B., & Geisler, G. (2012). A synthesis of research on ICT adoption and use by medical professionals in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGHIT International Health Informatics Symposium, (IHI ’12), 161-170.
Health care practitioners rely on access to relevant and up-to-date medical information in order to effectively treat their patients. One efficient, low-cost avenue for such information is online collections, but certain regions lack the information and communication technologies (ICT) necessary for widespread and reliable access to online resources. The characteristics of existing ICT infrastructure in many developing countries are not well understood. This research synthesis focuses on Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), an area with low levels of ICT infrastructure. It presents a synthesis of statistical analyses and a review across disciplines of information published on the state of ICT and health information access in SSA. An overview of the existing knowledge allowed us to identify the salient features of this particular ICT environment, and informed the development of a survey for SSA healthcare professionals. The synthesis and preliminary results from our survey suggest that Internet connectivity remains highly unreliable in Sub-Saharan Africa and that mobile devices provide the most reliable technology for health care providers to carry out their work.
Geisler, G., Willard, G. & Ovalle, C. (2011). “A crowdsourcing framework for the production and use of film and television data.” New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 17(1), 73-97.
This paper outlines a framework that would enable the detailed indexing of film and television media through crowdsourcing. By making it easier to generate detailed data about these media on a large scale, fans and scholars can more efficiently produce a wide range of artifacts that reflect their interests in this content. Our development of a test collection included detailed indexing of 12 feature films and 8 television programs. We describe the conditions that make crowdsourcing an ideal approach for accomplishing this work on a larger scale; present a three-level development framework; and discuss how automated indexing, crowdsourcing quality, and copyright concerns might influence continued development of the project. Our framework highlights the potential of both multimedia indexing and crowdsourcing and can serve as a model for others embarking on projects that involve indexing, annotating, or labeling large multimedia collections.
Geisler, G., Willard, G. & Whitworth, E. (2010). Crowdsourcing the indexing of film and television media. In Proceedings of the 73rd Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T 2010).
In this paper we describe a project that explores how advances in information technology could be used to make film and television media more accessible to both scholarly and non-scholarly audiences. By indexing, at a detailed level, a range of time-synchronized and non-time- synchronized elements in a test collection of 12 films and 8 television programs, we demonstrate how structured data representing many aspects of media content can be produced in a streamlined manner, and discuss how this work could potentially be augmented with automated indexing to be more efficient. We present examples of how this data can be utilized to produce a variety of tools and artifacts that make film and television media more accessible, and suggest that crowdsourcing could be an effective strategy for accomplishing this work on a larger scale. This research contributes to the growing body of literature exploring how multimedia collections can be made more accessible and useful for a variety of purposes.
Geisler, G., Stenis, P., Martinez, J., & King, A. (2008). Game Scholar: Do we need a reference database for video game research? [poster]. In Proceedings of the 71st Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T 2008), 465-469.
Given the growing influence of video games and the likelihood that video games will be the focus of an increasing amount of criticism and research, we suggest that a comprehensive information resource on the topic could be of significant value to the scholarly community. The Game Scholar prototype and research study are aimed at understanding whether there is in fact a need for such a resource and if so, what information would be most useful to include in the resource.
Bollen, J., Nelson, M., Geisler, G., & Araujo, R. (2007). “Usage derived recommendations for a video digital library.” Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 30(3), 1059-1083.
We describe a minimalist methodology to develop usage-based recommender systems for multimedia digital libraries. A prototype recommender system based on this strategy was implemented for the Open Video Project, a digital library of videos that are freely available for download. Sequential patterns of video retrievals are extracted from the project’s web download logs and analyzed to generate a network of video relationships. A spreading activation algorithm locates video recommendations by searching for associative paths connecting query-related videos. We evaluate the performance of the resulting system relative to an item-based collaborative filtering technique operating on user profiles extracted from the same log data.
Geisler, G. & Burns, S. (2007). Tagging video: Conventions and strategies of the YouTube community [poster]. In Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2007), 480.
This poster summarizes the results from a quantitative analysis of the tags and associated metadata used to describe more than one million videos by 537,246 contributors at the YouTube video sharing site. Results from this work suggest methodological and design considerations that could enhance the effectiveness of sharing within communities devoted to online video.
Marchionini, G., Wildemuth, B. M., & Geisler, G. (2006). “The Open Video Digital Library: A mobius strip of research and practice.” Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 57(12), 1629-1643.
The Open Video Digital Library (OVDL) provides digital video files to the education and research community and is distinguished by an innovative user interface that offers multiple kinds of visual surrogates to people searching for video content. The OVDL is used by several thousand people around the world each month and part of this success is due to its user interface. This article examines the interplay between research and practice in the development of this particular digital library with an eye toward lessons for all digital libraries. We argue that theoretical and research goals blur into practical goals and practical goals raise new research questions as research and development progress—this process is akin to walking along a Möbius strip in which a locally two-sided surface is actually part of a globally one-sided world. We consider the gulf between the theories that guide current digital library research and current practice in operational digital libraries, provide a developmental history of the OVDL and the research frameworks that drove its development, illustrate how user studies informed its implementation and revision, and conclude with reflections and recommendations on the interplay between research and practice.
Bollen, J., Nelson, M., Araujo, R., & Geisler, G. (2005). Video recommendations for the Open Video Project [poster]. In Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2005), 369.
We describe a DL multimedia recommender system implemented for the Open Video project. Recommendations are generated by a spreading activation algorithm operating on a video network created from log download sequences. We compared the system’s rec- ommendations to those generated by a collaborative filtering technique.
Geisler, G. (2004). The Open Video Project: Redesigning a digital video digital library [Presentation].American Society for Information Science and Technology Information Architecture Summit.
Yang, M., Wildemuth, B.M., Marchionini, G., Wilkens, T., Geisler, G., Hughes, A., Gruss, R., & Webster, C. (2003). Measuring user performance during interactions with digital video collections. In Proceedings of the 66th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T 2003), 3-11.
With more and more digital videos found online, video retrieval researchers have begun to create various representations or surrogates for digital videos, such as poster frames, storyboards, video skims and fast forwards. How to evaluate the effectiveness of these video surrogates has become an issue for researchers. This paper proposes two general classes of user tasks—recognition tasks and tasks requiring inference—for which performance measures were developed. The measures include graphical object recognition, textual object recognition, action recognition, free-text gist determination, multiple-choice gist determination and visual gist determination. The preliminary results from two user studies applying these six measures are also discussed in this paper.
Wildemuth, B.M., Marchionini, G., Yang, M., Geisler, G., Wilkens, T., Hughes, A., & Gruss, R. (2003). How fast is too fast? Evaluating fast forward surrogates for digital video. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2003), 221-230.(Vannevar Bush Award Winner for Best Paper at JCDL 2003)
To support effective browsing, interfaces to digital video libraries should include video surrogates (i.e., smaller objects that can stand in for the videos in the collection, analogous to abstracts standing in for documents). The current study investigated four variations (i.e., speeds) of one form of video surrogate: a fast forward created by selecting every Nth frame from the full video. In addition, it tested the validity of six measures of user performance when interacting with video surrogates. Forty-five study participants interacted with all four versions of the fast forward surrogate, and completed all six performance tasks with each. Surrogate speed affected performance on four of the measures: object recognition (graphical), action recognition, linguistic gist comprehension (full text), and visual gist comprehension. Based on these results, we recommend a fast forward default speed of 1:64 of the original video keyframes. In addition, users should control the choice of fast forward speed to adjust for content characteristics and personal preferences.
Wildemuth, B.M., Marchionini, G., Wilkens, T., Yang, M., Geisler, G., Fowler, B., Hughes, A., & Mu, X. (2002). Alternative surrogates for video objects in a digital library: Users' perspectives on their relative usability. In Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Digital Libraries.
In a digital environment, it is feasible to integrate multimedia materials into a library collection with ease. However, it seems likely that non-textual surrogates for multimedia objects, e.g., videos, could effectively augment textual representations of those objects. In this study, five video surrogates were evaluated in relation to their usefulness and usability in accomplishing specific tasks. The surrogates (storyboards with text or audio keywords, slide shows with text or audio keywords, fast forward) were created for each of seven video segments. Ten participants, all of whom watch videos at least monthly and search for videos at least occasionally, viewed the surrogates for seven video segments and provided comments about the strengths and weaknesses of each. In addition, they performed a series of tasks (gist determination, object recognition, action recognition, and visual gist determination) with three surrogates selected from those available. No surrogate was universally judged 'best,' but the fast forward surrogate garnered the most support, particularly from experienced video users. The participants expressed their understanding of video gist as composed of three components: topicality, the story of the video, and the visual gist of the video. They identified several real-world tasks for which they regularly use video collections. The viewing compaction rates used in these surrogates supported adequate performance, but users expressed a desire for more control over surrogate speed and sequencing. Further development of these surrogates is warranted by these results, as well as the development of mechanisms for surrogate display.
Geisler, G., Giersch, S., McArthur, D., McClelland, M. (2002). Creating virtual collections in digital libraries: Benefits and implementation issues. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2002).
Digital libraries have the potential to not only duplicate many of the services provided by traditional libraries but to extend them. Basic finding aids such as search and browse are common in most of today’s digital libraries. But just as a traditional library provides more than a card catalog and browseable shelves of books, an effective digital library should offer a wider range of services. Using the traditional library concept of special collections as a model, in this paper we propose that explicitly defining sub-collections in the digital library—virtual collections—can benefit both the library’s users and contributors and increase its viability. We first introduce the concept of a virtual collection, outline the costs and benefits for defining such collections, and describe an implementation of collection-level metadata to create virtual collections for two different digital libraries. We conclude by discussing the implications of virtual collections for enhancing interoperability and sharing across digital libraries, such as those that are part of the National SMETE Digital Library.
Geisler, G., Marchionini, G., Wildemuth, B.M., Yang, M., Hughes, A., Wilkens, T., & Spinks, R. (2002). Video browsing interfaces for the Open Video Project. In Proceedings of CHI 2002, Extended Abstracts.
The Open Video Project is an on-going effort to develop an open source digital video collection that can be used by the research community and ultimately serve an even broader audience. The initial collection contains video or metadata for more than 1600 digitized video segments comprising nearly half a terabyte of content. Our primary goals for this project are to provide free digital video content to people doing a wide variety of research, to develop a collaborative research environment for people interested in digital video, and to provide a testbed for our own video browsing interface work. Each of these goals fit within a broader mission to understand how people think about, seek, and use digital video. This demonstration summarizes the current status of the project through a brief tour of the Open Video web site, describes our current work in developing surrogates to preview video segments, and shows an innovative video browsing interface we are developing.
Geisler, G., Marchionini, G., Wildemuth, B.M., Yang, M., Hughes, A., Wilkens, T., & Spinks, R. (2002). Video browsing interfaces for the Open Video Project. In CHI 2002 Video Proceedings.
Video overview of the Open Video Project, an on-going effort to develop an open source digital video collection that can be used by the research community and ultimately serve an even broader audience.
Geisler, G., Marchionini, G., Nelson, M.L., Spinks, R. & Yang, M. (2001). Interface concepts for the Open Video Project. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the American Society for Information Science (ASIS&T 2003), 58-75.
The Open Video Project is an on-going effort to develop an open source digital video collection that can be used by the information retrieval, digital library, and digital video research communities and ultimately serve an even broader audience. The collection currently contains about 350 video segments from 40 different titles, with a range of characteristics. We believe developing and using this collection as a shared video testbed can help advance progress in video retrieval research by fostering a collaborative research environment. In this paper we first discuss the underlying challenges of compiling and maintaining an open source digital video collection, and then describe the user interface strategies we are developing to enable people to explore and retrieve video from the collection effectively and efficiently.
Efron, M. & Geisler, G. (2001). Is it all about connections? Factors affecting the performance of a link-based recommender system. In Proceedings of the SIGIR 2001 Workshop on Recommender Systems.
This study reports on a recent evaluation of the similarity model used by Recommendation Explorer, an automatic recommender system. In particular, we consider the role of several system-internal factors in determining the quality of recommendation. More generally, we discuss factors in the recommendation task itself that complicate the construction and evaluation of recommender systems, and reflect on the implications of our findings for research in this area.
Geisler, G., McArthur, D., & Giersch, S. (2001). Developing recommendation services for a digital library with uncertain and changing data. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, 199-200.Association for Computing Machinery.
In developing recommendation services for a new digital library called iLumina (www.ilumina-project.org), we are faced with several challenges related to the nature of the data we have available. The availability and consistency of data associated with iLumina is likely to be highly variable. Any recommendation strategy we develop must be able to cope with this fact, while also being robust enough to adapt to additional types of data available over time as the digital library develops. In this paper we describe the challenges we are faced with in developing a system that can provide our users with good, consistent recommendations under changing and uncertain conditions.
Nelson, M.L., Marchionini, G., Geisler, G., & Yang, M. (2001). A bucket architecture for the Open Video Project. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, 310-311.Association for Computing Machinery.
The Open Video project is a collection of public domain digital video available for research and other purposes. The Open Video collection currently consists of approximately 350 video segments, ranging in duration from 10 seconds to 1 hour. Rapid growth for the collection is planned through agreements with other video repository projects and provision for user contribution of video. To handle the increased accession, we are experimenting with 'buckets,' aggregative intelligent publishing constructs for use in digital libraries.
Efron, M. & Geisler, G. (2001). Using dimensionality reduction to improve similarity judgements for recommendation. In Proceedings of the Second DELOS Network of Excellence Workshop on Personalisation and Recommender Systems in Digital Libraries.
Recommendation Explorer is an experimental recommender system that attempts to address the provisional and contextual nature of user information needs by coupling the system's interface and recommendation algorithms. This study reports on the development and evaluation of a new similarity module for RecEx. Based on the dimensionality reduction via the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), the new module discovers high-order relationships among database items, thus obtaining a robust model of item-item similarity.
Geisler, G. & Marchionini, G. (2000). The Open Video Project: A research-oriented digital video repository. In Proceedings of Digital Libraries '00: The Fifth ACM Conference on Digital Libraries, 258-259.Association for Computing Machinery.
A future with widespread access to large digital libraries of video is nearing reality. Anticipating this future, a great deal of research is focused on methods of browsing and retrieving digital video, developing algorithms for creating surrogates for video content, and creating interfaces that display result sets from multimedia queries. Research in these areas requires that each investigator acquire and digitize video for their studies since the multimedia information retrieval community does not yet have a standard collection of video to be used for research purposes. The primary goal of the Open Video Project is to create and maintain a shared digital video repository and test collection to meet these research needs.
Marchionini, G., Geisler, G., & Brunk, B. (2000). AgileViews: A human-centered framework for interfaces to information spaces. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the American Society for Information Science (ASIS 2000), 271-280.
A framework for interface design that provides people with flexible control over different views for an information space is presented. The agileviews framework defines overviews, previews, reviews, peripheral views, and shared views that help people make decisions about where they should focus attention during information seeking. In addition to the views themselves, control mechanisms that facilitate low-effort actions and strategies for coordinating the views are discussed. Agileviews are particularly useful when specific partitions of large information spaces such as the WWW have been identified. Examples of these views are provided from several different projects and suggestions for additional research and development are made.
Slaughter, L., Marchionini, G. & Geisler, G. (2000). “Open Video: A framework for a test collection.” Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 23, 219-245.
The future will bring widespread access to large digital libraries of video. Consequently, a great deal of research is focused on methods of browsing and retrieving digital video. This type of work requires that investigators acquire and digitize video for their studies since the video information retrieval community does not yet have a collection of video for research purposes. There is a clear need for a shared test collection that they can use. This paper provides a framework for such a test collection and describes the Open Video Project that has begun to develop a test collection based on this framework. The proposed test collection is meant to be used to study a wide range of problems, such as tests of algorithms for creating surrogates for video content or interfaces that display result sets from queries. An important challenge in developing such a collection is storing and distributing video objects. This paper is meant to layout video management issues that may influence distributed storage solutions. More specifically, this paper describes the first phase for creating the test collection, sets guidelines for building the collection, and serves as a basis for discussion to inform subsequent phases and invite research community involvement.
Dempsey, B.J., Wildemuth, B.M., & Geisler, G. (1999). Use of an expanding directory interface for WWW legal resources [poster]. In Proceedings of Digital Libraries '99: The Fourth ACM Conference on Digital Libraries.
The Internet contains many legal resources which supplement more established online sources, but effective resource discovery tools are critical for end users. The Directory of Internet-Accessible Legal Resources (DIALeR), http://legalsearch.ils.unc.edu/, was developed to aid in rapid discovery and navigation between high-quality legal sites. The resources in the DIALeR (MS SQL) database were selected by law librarians with an eye towards finding reputable WWW sites that are building significant repositories of public domain documents.
