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. 

Week four: Descriptors and keywords

My focus this week is descriptors. Descriptors are the words used to describe the various assets, the words that may eventually become keywords. 

I say may because, for this project, not all of the descriptors might be useful as keywords. Some will be in the text description while others will be used as metadata on the items. It's really the ones that end up in metadata that are of particular concern. 

Deciding which facets are important to be able to search on is part of what my job is on this project. So, while there are many ways to describe the digital assets, not all are useful for searching, sorting, or filtering. It's my job, along with my supervisor and the manager, to understand which are useful and which aren't. 

Currently, I have 139 descriptors. I'm still conducting interviews so the list may grow, although each interview elicits fewer new terms. I have started standardizing some of the vocabulary (the original list of terms was over 150). One task I need to start is categorizing the descriptors. With such a long list, they need to be organized into facets or they will be too unwieldy to use. 

Tried and true

My idea is to use card sorting, which is often used to organize the hierarchy of a website, to sort the descriptors into facets. Using knowledgeable staff to help determine what category different descriptors belong to and find good labels will be much more productive than me trying to figure out whether a term should be, say, "technology" or "tool". I'm a fan of using physical cards, especially with a small group of people doing the sort, although there are online tools I could use. Looking into those tools to see if there is one that would suit my needs is on my plan for Thursday.

In classes, I've done some card sorting (in Z515, Information Architecture) and I've created a faceted vocabulary (in Z503, Representation and Organization), but those were mostly theoretical applications or with familiar domains. Actually taking a bunch of information from an unfamiliar domain and organizing it is a little intimidating but also a good test. And, I don't have to do it all myself. That's the point of having the staff participate in a card sort: they will help guide the final organization. They and clients (users) will need to understand the organization and structure, so it needs to be based in already established organization.