Leala Abbott

The Role of Digital Art History: Report by Samuel H. Kress Foundation

Leala Abbott — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 22:11:15 +0000

A colleague just pointed me in the direction of a new report out on Art History’s transition (or lack thereof) to digital, written by Diane M. Zorich, for the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Her report seeks to gain a deeper understanding of why art historians feel such “ambivalence” toward digital art history.

Zorich covers the limiting infrastructure of these domains to the impacts that the “new” digital publishing model is having against the age old, “publish or perish” model. This change to digital is one that Art Historians have been very reluctant to embrace (in some cases even hostile). Digital is just a “trend” afterall, right?

This resistance to change has all kinds of unforeseen consequences to art organizations looking to transcend this lack of collaboration and resulting analog barrier to join the digital world. Ever try and do a digital project in a museum or even build a museum website worth visiting? This report is for you (even if to make you feel less alone).

A memorable take away (or two):

“the discipline is seen as overly conservative, operating under a century-old, risk-averse model. For those who are vested in this model, digital art history threatens their operational paradigm, requiring new training, methodologies, and modes for communicating and distributing research that changes the practice of art history as it is now conducted.”

“Art historians also are described as perfectionists, a trait that serves them well in the discipline, but is at odds with the nature of digital research, where nimbleness—being able to work quickly to release research in preliminary and iterative stages—is vitally important.”

— Diane M. Zorich (2013): Digital Art History: A Community Assessment, Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, 29:1-2, 14-21.

Pickup a copy here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2013.761108 or visit your local library.

Marketing your metadata schemas: Break them out of the spreadsheet!

Leala Abbott — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:43:12 +0000

With most things in life, context is key.

We work with it so much we often forget how abstract a metadata schema trapped in a spreadsheet can be. All our hours of work, relegated to a boring set of rows and columns. It’s anti-climatic and no one except for a few right-brain folks, usually tech, even want to read it. In some cases its necessary to get your message across to other stakeholders outside the realm of IT. Therefore, its important to boil your work down to the most important aspects. I’ve found the thing that they are looking for most is context and simplicity.

Whether you are creating a metadata schema, a content blueprint, a metadata matrix, or whatever you are calling it these days, relate it to your audience. Here’s some examples of how:

Annotations: For the design of a website or application for example, do what you can to relate your schema to the wireframes or designs, visually. The easiest way I have found is to annotate wireframes, showing both the visible stuff and the hidden relationships. Ask yourself for every piece of content (text, images, etc.) on the page, “Where is this data/content coming from?”. Then answer that question, by adding your metadata element(s) and their definitions. Show your clients where and how the field is being used, directly on the designs. There are a lot of free annotation tools out there: http://mashable.com/2010/12/23/free-annotation-collaboration-tools/. For more Adobe savvy folks, use InDesign, executed properly you can create some really captivating annotations.

Tagging examples: Creating a metadata schema for a product? Create some examples of what that tagging would look like. Make it relevant to the project. Add in your references to controlled vocabularies, or other relationships. Leave out the DC (we’re the only people that enjoy geeking out on Dublin Core) and display user-friendly labels instead. Save the DC architecture for metadata schema itself, not the higher-level stakeholder document. Every metadata schema I create lists the DC element base, the equivalent admin label (what the admin user sees on the tagging interface), and the UI label (what the website visitor sees). I always use the latter two for showing my work to clients.

Diagramming: Create diagrams of what the relationships between different pieces of content and modules look like. For example with products show what information is applied at the sku level vs. the product level. There are a number of diagramming tools online: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2006/09/01/list-of-nifty-tools-diagrams-charts/. Remember to keep these diagrams as simple as possible, you don’t have to show everything, just what’s important to establish context. The metadata schema will be there to back it all up and show the details.

Education: I’ve found that presenting a discussion around language can clear up a lot of confusion. As part of my metadata documents I generally include a bit of education. Have a lot of controlled vocabularies in your schema? Explain them. Remembering to keep it simple, and make it audience appropriate. Keep it to one page, with lots of white space and make use of fonts. Channel your inner designer, make it pretty, and use InDesign or an equivalent tool to create a clean layout.

In the end give your stakeholders, something easy-to-follow, pretty (a little color goes a long way), and relevant. Got some great examples? Post them in the comments.

Taxonomy Development: When in doubt, buy a book!

Leala Abbott — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 18:43:34 +0000

I’m often asked about my process in creating taxonomies where no taxonomy has gone before (or they have and no ones talking). All taxonomists have little tricks they use to make the magic happen and this is one of mine. Books.

Years ago when I needed to develop a language to describe patterns for a design house, I used a well-known patterns textbook called, Textile Designs: Two Hundred Years of European and American Patterns Organized by Motif, Style, Color, Layout, and Period”. I highly recommend this book as an example of what to look for in a good reference book, as it features genius organization and descriptions. Flash forward to almost 10 years later and I still reference this book every time I work with and create fashion taxonomies. I also still use this technique of leveraging a well-known or heavily referenced resource book as my foundation for taxonomy builds.

So how does one go about selecting just the right authoritative source(s)? Here’s a few things I look for:

1. Textbooks: Look for books that are referenced by students of the discipline as they have developed their careers around it. It will be both familiar to SME’s of the industry and standardized. If you get really lucky the way the book is organized can provide you with a beautiful framework to build on.

2. Versions: So your book may not be the canonical textbook that students use, but if its been available over a number of years in increasing version, chances are somebody is using it regularly. The versioning is also an indicator (not a guarantee), that it is being updated to include recent developments in trends, technology and industry terminology.

3. Guidebooks and Handbooks: I love guidebooks and handbooks as they cut to the chase quickly and often provide deep enough exploration of a topic to provide you with solid term groups without the overkill. A good example of this is the Smithsonian Handbook on Gemstones, published by Dorling Kindersley. This book is organized nicely and visually appealing, thus doing the double duty of helping you create a taxonomy and providing a good resource for content creators to reference when they need to start tagging content.

4. Authoritative source: In general I look for books that are published by thought leaders in that particular subject area or resources that are heavily referenced in that field of expertise. The Amazon “customers who bought this also bought” is also extremely helpful in locating these resources.

5. Blogs, Magazines and new publications: When designing for digital and the web sometimes topical academic resources on taxonomies are too-stuffy or unnecessarily enterprise level (an 18-wheeler truck when only a 4-wheel car is needed). So I often find that periodicals, blogs and newly published books can also give my builds something fresher and unexpected. Use these sparingly though and always build on something sturdy, but utilize

Creating taxonomies in an agency environment requires the enjoyment of developing a serial proficiency on many topics. I’ve found that books are a great way to get up to speed on a topic, and simultaneously also providing me with a nice framework for my taxonomy. Although it may not be as easy as, “taking other peoples indexes and make them shorter”, as one of my colleagues humorously said. A well organized book should provide you with both an education and a sturdy backbone for your build, which is a much better starting point than a blank page.

Different Types of Controlled Vocabularies

Leala Abbott — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 15:45:30 +0000

———————————————————————————————
There are four types of Controlled Vocabularies:
———————————————————————————————

>Value list:
Lists of terms with no semantic relationships. For example a list of values for a drop-down menu.

>Synonym ring:
Terms linked together with equivalent synonyms (our kitty cat image below).

>Taxonomy:
Hierarchal lists (with broader and narrower categories) or faceted lists which also might include synonyms.

>Thesaurus:
The most complex form which combines all three types of semantic relationships (synonyms, hierarchy and associations such as: used for, broader term/BT, narrower term/NT, related term/RT).

As you move from left to right we see that the structural complexity increases in the types of semantic relationships present (equivalence, hierarchical and associative).

Not everyone agrees on the order represented above:
Morville and Rosenfeld (The Polar Book/Information Architecture for the World Wide Web pp. 194-201) put things in a slightly different order (synonym rings then value lists) which I’ve never really quite understood their reasoning behind. However, I prefer the method used by Stephen J Miller in Metadata for Digital Collections. I highly recommend you buy his book now. Although its primarily focused on Digital Collections its one of the best books to read if you are trying to get your head around metadata.

A Synonym Ring of Kitty Terms

Ode to the Knowledge Worker

Leala Abbott — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 18:28:53 +0000

This is a field with a million different ways to interpret or apply something. It’s a field with a million different answers to one question and it is a field with a million questions that have no true answer. It’s hard to master this topic and it is even harder to keep pace with how quickly it moves and changes.

It has a million rabbit trails and “areas of specialization,” and even more that are no longer relevant or applicable. It’s dynamic and yet somehow manages to woo you in with creature comforts. It’s never stationary, but sometimes focuses on staying power. You can’t put your finger on it, yet we have to put OUR finger on it to do our jobs.

You often work alone, but your presence is felt by many. Everything is always different around you, yet you have to make it consistent. There is so much out there, yet you have to define the needle in the haystack so that it can be found.

THIS IS THE DOMAIN OF THE KNOWLEDGE WORKER

Use the Automator to Extract a list of Filenames to a Txt file

Leala Abbott — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 17:21:11 +0000

The MAC OS Automator is the swiss army knife of tools, just take a look at these “10 Awesome Uses for Automator” and I often wonder how I lived without it. In my line of work, sometimes I need to extract a list of filenames contained on a CD or a directory and dump them into a text file for analysis. Lucky for me the automator makes this task super easy and painless. You too can enjoy this in 6 easy steps.

Step 1

Fire up Automator and select File > New > Custom

Step 2

Create your Automation by dragging commands, called actions, into the Automator workspace starting with “Ask for Finder Items”.

Screenshot - MAC Automator Action

Step 3

Drag over “Get Folder Contents” from the Action list to the automator workspace. For my purposes I usually check the “Repeat for each subfolder found” depending on how deep you need to go, but I usually want EVERYTHING.

Screenshot - MAC Automator Workspace

Step 4

Drag over “New Text File” from the Action list to the automator workspace. Add a “save as” title to your text file if you want and then, put it where you want. I usually put it right on my “Desktop”.

Screenshot - MAC Automator Text

Step 5

Time to run it and see if it works. Hit the “Run” (play) button in the top right-hand corner and watch the magic happen. If all works according to plan you will get a dialog box that asks you where you want to look for your dump. In the example below I want to extract a list of the file contents of my Alpha One Labs project directory.

After hitting play, If everything worked you should have an output of the filenames contained in the directory as a text file on your desktop. Remember to save it and now you can extract to you hearts content, whenever you need.

Screenshot - MAC Automator Dialog

Step 6 (optional)
I generally import the txt file into something like Excel via “File > Import > txt file” with the forward slash as my delimiter so I can work with the information better.

Screenshot - Excel Text Import Dialog

Createasphere Presentation (3/02/2011): DAM Book Resources

Leala Abbott — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 21:48:45 +0000

Here is a list of the DAM resources that I listed in my Createasphere Presentation in Universal City (Los Angeles), CA, on March 2, 2011:

Dont Make me Think – Steve Krug
Mental Models – Indi Young
Designing Interfaces – Jennifer Tidwell

Metadata and Taxonomy books

Building Enterprise Taxonomies – Daren L. Stewart
The Accidental Taxonomist – Heather Hedden
Metadata Solutions: Using Metamodels – Adrienne Tannenbaum

Digital Asset Management - David Austerberry
The DAM Book – Peter Krogh

List of DAM Products Tech Specs by Vendor

Leala Abbott — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 16:57:54 +0000

To try and make sense out of the DAM space and the products that are on offer from a technical perspective, I have created the Google Spreadsheet project which lists DAM products tech specs by Vendor. It is my hope (and some can say it already has) that this will become a collaborative effort by the DAM community to parse this information down to its most boiler plate facets.

Its a no frills, no promotional sales language, vendor agnostic, approach to just getting to the basics of the technologies on offer. The focus of the list is on the technology aspects of the products as opposed to the features or strengths. Currently, the document has 70+ collaborators including myself (and we are adding more every day). Please contact me if you like to be added to the list of collaborators or visit the link and request access here.

Below is a list of each column featured on the DAM List:

Vendor
URL
Products Offered
Proprietary or Open Source
Solutions Offered: Installed, Hosted, SaaS
Technical Specs: Server (Database)
Technical Specs: Server (APP/Webserver)
Technical Specs: Code Base (back-end)
Technical Specs: Code Base (UI)
Technical Specs: OS (Server)
Technical Specs: OS (Client)
Technical Specs: API (Software)
Technical Specs: API (Webservice)
Technical Specs: Search Engine
Metadata Handling: XMP
Who’s Using it: non-profits, museums and organizations
Who’s Using It: corporate and for-profit enterprises

The Analog-ists Revenge: How analog thinking can impact DAM

Leala Abbott — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 23:38:25 +0000

When I was working as an archives assistant (traditional collections processing), I had the pleasure of training under an archivist that I still admire greatly today. She understood the reality that you can’t keep everything and you certainly can’t process everything according to some unrealistic standard. In the archives profession this philosophy can be seen as the “More Product, Less Process” approach created by M. Greene and D. Meissner in 2005. Their article on the topic states unapologetically that “processing is not keeping up with acquisitions, and has not been for decades…”. This realization sparked many debates in the archival community as it was both revolutionary and challenged everything that had come before, with good reason. No longer was it acceptable to keep and process everything, things had to change.

Let’s take Greene and Meissners message and apply it to the digital realm. Working in the digital realm requires the ability to make judicious decisions regarding what to keep, how to keep it and where to keep it. You have to have the ability to say “no” and understand that you can’t keep everything. That folder, filing cabinet and even the human to file it cost a whole lot less than software, databases, servers and technical support. You also cannot keep digital materials in the same exhaustive manner as you might have with analog material. If you have spent most of your career managing analog materials this is a difficult philosophical shift to make, even impossible for some. However, its a shift that is necessary to work in today’s technology driven environment, if you plan on managing digital materials with any success.

Digital Asset Managers understand that every digital asset we choose comes with a cost (resources it will take to manage, upkeep, file formats, migrations etc), therefore we are extremely judicious with both what we keep (the assets) and how we keep it (the metadata). We have to say “no” when something is just outside the scope of the collection or would involve to much manual metadata entry. Whenever possibly we side with automation as opposed to human processing or cataloging. For example a system that required every time an asset was used a job number to be entered into a metadata field is just not scalable over time. A more sensible approach would be that the ordering system and the DAM talked to one another and populated that field automatically. If that wasn’t possible then the digital asset manager might choose to only record the first order number associated with the asset.

In general digital asset managers think holistically and try to understand things on a iterative level. We understand that adopting a particular standard for applying information to assets can have vast repercussions down the line and nothing is ever permanent as technology changes yesterday. We have to choose our methods very wisely and use the word, “no” more often than we would like. Anytime I come across a complex worfklow or best practice, I know “analog” thinking is to blame and people were not thinking holistically. Siloed analog approaches just don’t work in the digital realm, they don’t leverage the efficiencies of technology and they don’t take into account exactly how much content is being created every day and what it’s going to take to mange that glut of information.

Digital Asset Managers understand how to leverage data across disparate databases, rather than the old analog method of using repetition and making copies (silos) to keep information together and create relationships (i.e. the carbon copy). The result of analog-ist thinking will often lead to an unfathomable amount of backlog and digital paperwork, because the workflow/standard they created would only be achievable if you had an army at your disposal. To me this poor judgment is not “job security”, as I’ve heard far too often, its analog-ist insecurity. These types of judgment calls are the result of not understanding at the conceptual core, what technology allows us to do and what it requires in return.

To describe how managing digital information differs from the analog world. I often use my Greek Vase analogy. Let’s say you have a Greek Vase, an actual physical 3-D object, this vase is not going to replicate itself right before your eyes hundreds of times, that digital file on the other hand, will do it in a heartbeat. Therefore working with digital resources requires a completely different shift in thinking and practices that worked great for managing analog materials, just won’t scale when moved to the digital realm.

It’s about focusing on retaining what’s really, really, important and the most appropriate place for those resources. For example, objects should go in a collections management system (glass and film negatives are objects too), and digital assets should be managed in a DAM. Both can have different metadata schemas, but they might also share some common elements (Title, description, keywords etc). You don’t have to repeat content or information in both systems, you can just have the systems talk to one another. You can focus on master assets in the DAM and original objects in the collections management system. You also don’t need to create/upload thumbnails or web-ready assets in your DAM as it should create them automatically. In an analog world this was not possible, if you wanted a smaller copy of something you had to physically make it and then save that as you didn’t want to have to make that same thing manually every single time.

If you don’t think about scalability when choosing what to digital assets to keep, the management of those resources over time, formatting, migrations etc. you will quickly end up with more process and less product over time. In the end it really comes down to quantity and resources, like with the Greek Vase analogy. You may only ever have the one object, but over time you will have many surrogate digital representations of that object. You cannot think about managing digital files the same way you did with analog materials, there is just too much of it. In an ideal world we would have lots and lots of everything and lots and lots of information about everything, but that’s unrealistic and unless you have the manpower of Google to process all of it, it’s just not going to happen. Therefore you must be judicious in the execution of your scope, use the right tools for the job, think holistically and don’t over complicate.

Another DAM Panel

Leala Abbott — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 20:53:00 +0000

I recently conducted a DAM Panel at my place of work and participated in another panel the same day for the DAM NY Meetup Group. I can’t imagine a better way to present and discuss a topic. The audience does not have to suffer through a painful PowerPoint deck and I think the audience takes so much more away from the experience.

Panels are such a great way to introduce a topic as well as allowing experts to do what they do best, which is talk freely about their expertise. Therefore, I thought some of you might be interested in reading my moderator transcript and to possibly help inspire you to create a your own panel event.

The questions I proposed were general as a means to stir conversation and to introduce the practice of DAM.

The participants included: Henrik de Gyor, Chad Beer and Tony Gill. I would like to think them again virtually for being such a great panel and especially to Tony Gill who filled-in a vacancy about 2-hours before my panel started. You’re a star! My only regret from the panel is that I did not record the responses, sorry readers!

Panel Transcript:

The first set of questions are going to address What DAM is, what it isn’t, why you need it and the types of professionals that play a role in DAM.

DAM is about helping users to find meaningful and relevant information in amongst the noise.

Q. How do you introduce the topic of Digital Asset Management to those who are hearing about it for the first time?
One of the recurring conversations I have with those new to DAM scape is explaining the difference between business process of DAM and the technology of DAM. As there is so much focus on purchasing technology that often times, process gets lots in the shuffle. Paul Nicholson, VP of Print and broadcast production at Showtime said “People think that buying a tool will do it for them, but it wont. You have to have sound processes to start with”.

Q. How do you explain the difference between digital asset management as a practice and the technology that goes with DAM and how do you keep process in balance with technology decisions?
One of the aspects I enjoy most about Digital Asset Management is it is extremely cross-disciplinary and it allows me to collaborate different types of professionals. Collaboration and cross-disciplinary practitioners are essential to the implementation of DAM.

Q. So who are these folks and what types of skills are important to a successful Digital Asset Management strategy?

Now that we’ve covered some of the basics let’s discuss a bit about the users role in DAM. Central to any Digital Asset Management strategy is the end-user. Usability is an important aspect of Digital Asset Management and the role that user-acceptance plays an integral part in any DAM strategy.

A major aspect of user acceptance is training, and we have a lot of new tools at our disposal to enable us to reach users more effectively, for instance we can leveraging social media technologies like user forums, pod-casting and screen-casting.

Q. So, what are some of the ways you reach out, to educate and train users?
Some of the other main elements are more on the system side such as interface design, findability and front-end information architecture, metadata compliance with Dublin core, flexibility and scalability.

Q. What are some of the core elements you feel are necessary to gain user acceptance with DAM?
Another aspect of working with users is the challenge of keeping it simple! Ray Ozzie, Former (as of about three days ago) Chief Software architect at Microsoft said it best “Complexity sucks the life out of users, developers and IT and constrains the ability of an organization to progress”. It’s always amazing to me how quickly complexities can arise in the development of a digital asset management strategy.

Q. What are some of your strategies for getting down to the bare-bones needs and keeping it simple?
Another topic that comes up often at Digital Asset Management conferences is change management. One of the great things about being a Digital Asset Manager is the possibilities you bring to the table have the potential to rewrite and shape how an organization exchanges knowledge. On the other side of that is that there is safety in the sameness as it doesn’t require change, but it also doesn’t manifest anything very remarkable. Implementing DAM or any technology for that matter, can be good kind of disruption, as it challenges relationships and forces new thought patterns. So I like to think of DAM as a high impact sport as change plays such a central role.

Q. How do you facilitate and manage change in organizations, especially changes that are very personal to users such as workflow.

Also greatly effecting end-users is the pace of changing technologies, but it also plays a role in shaping the DAM profession..

DAM keeps me on my toes as the knowledge management industry overall is always dynamically evolving and changing. The ability to be Forward-thinking is a requirement and because of this we are often out there on the “bleeding-edge” and anytime you’re that far out there the reality of the “Oops” isn’t far behind. To be successful in this field you have to be comfortable with with pushing the envelope and making mistakes as long as you learn from them.

The tolerance for honest failure is a rule of the trade that Silicon Valley and shall I say our own Silicon Alley knows well. Examining failure and its link to creativity and technological successes is gaining a lot of attention. National Geographic right now has a short Documentary featuring Honda called “Failure: The Secret to Success” and just yesterday the San Francisco Chronicle covered FailCon 2010 which trains executives to embrace failure. The byline caught my attention because it stated if you want to be successful “you should study failure – because ‘oops’ is the mantra of champions”. In DAM knowing what not to do is just as important as knowing what to do.

Q. How does learning from past failures play a role in your approach to DAM?
Another part of working in this large, quickly moving, landscape of knowledge management is that it requires the professional to have an insatiable appetite for learning. It’s one of those just when you think you’ve caught up something new comes along and changes your mind. For example for some time I was on the fence with RAW vs. DNG file formats then along came the DP Best Flow report by the Library of Congress and American Society of Media Photographers, they made a persuasive argument with supporting DNG as a master negative file vs. the very proprietary RAW. Finally, I could get off the fence. However, as digital asset managers we often find ourselves on these fences.

Q. How do you keep pace with the world of DAM?