Academic fields and their relationships

As previously mentioned, I am currently tasked with determining the controlled vocabulary for:

• category
• field
• campus
• year

Campus and year are fairly simple. I feel like I have a pretty good handle on category, although that list might undergo minor changes. That leaves academic fields.

I had a rough list based on the fields of the 50 or so projects in my sample (some staff members shared projects, visualizations, and media that they work with; I have used those items to develop the list of keywords and filters that I have previously mentioned). 

Part of the trick with this project is making sure the controlled vocabulary can grow as needed. Currently, there are a few academic groups that the AVL has regularly collaborated with, which creates a bias toward those fields. Bearing that in mind, I started by creating a list of all the schools and departments on the eight IU campuses. 

There are a lot of fields represented by all the departments and schools.

Next step: I sorted all those departments and schools into broad categories: humanities, social sciences, natural sciences. There is a lot of overlap between humanities and social sciences. And natural sciences leaves out some important areas. Changing natural sciences to formal sciences (mathematics), physical sciences (chemistry, physics, earth sciences, space science), life sciences (biology), applied sciences (engineering, computer science, medicine, nursing, etc) is more useful, but also a lot of board categories, some of which really only have one field (yes, there are fields like microbiology, but the goal of this is to narrow the long list).

So I have settled on broad categories of humanities, social sciences, and sciences, with some fields further split out. While the list isn't quite done, I'm pretty happy with where it is right now. There will be some tweaking, but I feel like I have a good base. 

Part of creating this controlled vocabulary is testing it against my sample. I need test cases to demonstrate how the controlled vocabulary would be used. And there are a couple of items in my sample that don't fit any of those fields.

Now, athletics aren't necessarily an academic field, but sports are a big deal at a university. A couple of the visualizations involve Olympic or World Cup data on the Science on a Sphere. The athletic department might potentially be a client (the AVL has worked with the athletic department in the past). So I am considering adding athletics as a field. It's something to discuss with my supervisor, at any rate.

And that's where I am. Refining my lists, waiting to talk to my supervisor. 

Waiting to get feedback

This week involved a lot of looking at lists of keywords, arranging and rearranging them to try to make meaningful sense of all the possibilities. I spoke to a non-team member who might be the type of user this web portal will be designed for. Her feedback on how she would search for projects was very helpful, especially in terms of the labels for the main categories.

I also made some very rough wireframes of the idea I'm currently working with. And now I'm at a point where I really need some feedback.

I have 3 basic layout ideas, trying to balance "easy" buttons with the vast array of descriptors that will be used. Making a decision on which of those ideas to work from will allow me to start wireframing in earnest.

Version 3 of the basic layout

The second thing I need feedback on is my organization of the keywords and which should be used in filters and which just left to search terms. Or, do we leave all of them in a big tag cloud? Maybe not the best idea, but possibly closer to what is desired.

I also need to start gathering the assets that will go into the website. We need to organize the items, give them appropriate keywords, create a database or spreadsheet, write descriptions, etc.

So, I am waiting for my supervisor to look over what I have done and then we need to schedule a meeting with the manager and director so those decisions can be made.

And that's the take away this week: sometimes people are busy and you have to move to another part of the project you can do while you wait.