In doing this week’s readings, Mia Ridge’s point about the tension between the utilization of “easy-to-use datasets using common vocabularies” and “more sophisticated data structures and specialised vocabularies” stood out to me. I spent this past Sunday doing a “communication progression” as part of staff training on the UCLA challenge course (an on-campus space dedicated to experiential education). As part of\u00a0this training, I participated in a series of activities\u00a0with each building upon the last, that each had a different takeaway regarding communication methods and drawbacks.\u00a0In two of the challenges, one group of people had an object (a multicolored lego structure in one, a complicated pvc pipe sculpture in the other) that they had to get another group to replicate, without being able to show the other group the object and without the ability to see the building groups’ attempts.\u00a0The final results of our efforts (the comparison of the two structures at the end) provided a visual representation of the amount of information that was lost along the chain of conveyance. We recognized the need for establishing a common language, as many\u00a0of the discrepancies occurred as a result of differences in explanation and understanding amongst different people (e.g. in trying to convey length of pipe, metric system versus customary system provided a discrepancy in the pipes chosen).<\/p>\n
All this to say that once a widely-used common language has been established among those who practice data visualization, the graphs and charts themselves can act as a powerful common language for understanding museums and collections.\u00a0With a properly done graphic,\u00a0anyone from any walk of life or level of understanding should be able to look at it and gather what the creator was attempting to convey. I see this as the purpose of data visualization itself\u2013 it takes a trained eye to make sense of raw data, but visualizations transform that data into a universally accessible format. Such methods aide in transparency and public engagement, enforcing the openness of “open cultural data,” and the purpose of integrating technology into the museum sphere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In doing this week’s readings, Mia Ridge’s point about the tension between the utilization of “easy-to-use datasets using common vocabularies” and “more sophisticated data structures and specialised vocabularies” stood out … Continue reading “Week 3: Toward a Common Language”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}