Abstract
Narrativizing Disruption
How exploratory search can support media researchers to interpret ‘disruptive’ media events as lucid narratives
Abstract
'Disruptive' media events, such as terrorist attacks or environmental disasters, are difficult to interpret due to an inability to grasp the story and information being 'scattered' across multiple media platforms. This leads to problems for media scholars, who analyse how narratives construct different political, economic or cultural meanings around such events. Offering media scholars the ability to explore and create lucid narratives about media events therefore greatly supports their interpretative work.
This project studies how exploratory search can help to understand how 'disruptive' events are constructed as narratives across media, and instilled with specific cultural-political meanings. This project approaches this question by using CLARIAH components (the Linked Open Data exploratory search browser DIVE+, particularly it's navigation and bookmarking pane), to examine how scholars use and create narratives to understand media events.
Using a mixed-method approach, various qualitative methods (focus groups, questionnaires, user-generated research diaries, and co-creative design sessions in which users visualized their ideas on posters) were combined in an iterative design approach, which afforded self-reflective, fine-grained insights and lead to recommendations to incrementally adapt the exploratory search tool DIVE+.
The project's academic insights conclude how exploratory search supports media scholars in narrative creation. We gained a deeper understanding of the role of exploratory search in media research practices and what, in line with this, Linked Open Data (LOD) offers humanities and media scholars who search for new – serendipitous – research ideas and research questions. Software-specific insights produced recommendations at the entity, interface and user level, provided starting points for doing media research with audiovisual and historical materials about events, and finally, produced recommendations for auto-generating narratives based on exploratory search practices - including improvements for audiovisual annotation (or video annotation) as part of the navigation pane for DIVE+ users: allowing users to annotate entities in the path, and for paths and annotations to be exported into the CLARIAH user work space.
As a result, we evaluated how DIVE+ facilitates exploration, serendipity, and narrative creation, especially the pivotal ways in which digital tools' socio-technical affordances inform the processes of search and storytelling.
People
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Principal Investigator |
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Principal Investigator |
Project Team
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Lora Aroyo (VU University) |
Liliana Melgar (UvA, CLARIAH) |
Victor de Boer (VU University) |
Roeland Ordelman (Beeld en Geluid) |
Publications & Presentations
NarDis Publications
- Hagedoorn, B. and S. Sauer. (in preparation). 'The Researcher as Storyteller: Using Digital Tools for Search and Storytelling with Audio-Visual (AV) Materials'. VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture, Special Issue on Audiovisual Data in Digital Humanities, eds. Pelle Snickars, Mark Williams and Andreas Fickers.
- Inel, O., Sauer, S., & Aroyo, L. (2018). A study of narrative creation by means of crowds and niches. In A. Bozzon, & M. Venanzi (Eds.), HCOMP 2018 Works in Progress and Demonstration Papers (HCOMP WIP&DEMO 2018): Proceedings of the HCOMP 2018 Works in Progress and Demonstration Papers. Track of the Sixth AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2018). Zurich, Switzerland, July 5-8, 2018. (pp. 1-4). (CEUR Workshop Proceedings; Vol. 2173).
Presentations by the principal investigators:
- CLARIAH Toogdag presentation, Amsterdam, 10-3-2017
- DH Benelux (conference) presentation 2017, Utrecht, 4-7-2017
- DH Day University of Groningen presentation + workshop, Groningen, 26-10-2017
- Lecture for RMeS Research Master students, Utrecht, 2-3-2018
- CLARIAH Toog Dag Pitch 2018, The Hague, 9-3-2018
- RUG Research meeting presentation, Groningen, 23-3-2018
- RUG Visual Studies meeting presentation, Groningen, 8-5-2018
- Paper presentation 'The Media Researcher as Storyteller: Working with Digitized Audiovisual Sources' at Symposium 'The Many Lives of Audiovisual Heritage', Utrecht University, 16-5-2018
- Panel 'A Pragmatic Approach to Understanding and Utilising Events in Cultural Heritage', Lora Aroyo, Chiel van den Akker, Marnix van Berchum, Lodewijk Petram, Gerard Kuys, Tommaso Caselli, Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Victor de Boer, Sabrina Sauer and Berber Hagedoorn. DHBenelux 2017 Conference, Utrecht University, Utrecht, 5-7-2017
- Paper 'Linking data and disciplines: Exploring narratives through computational tools and interdisciplinary brokering', by Sabrina Sauer, Berber Hagedoorn, Liliana Melgar, Victor de Boer, Lora Aroyo and Carlos Martínez Ortiz, at DH Benelux 2018, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 6-6-2018
- NECS conference presentation, Amsterdam, 27-6-2018
- Paper 'Telling stories about (re)search: research practices reconfigured by digital search technologies', Sabrina Sauer & Berber Hagedoorn, EASST conference 2018: Meetings – Making Science, Technology and Society together, Lancaster University, Lancaster, 27-7-2018,
- CLARIAH Toogdag presentation, Amsterdam, 19-10-2018
- Presentation 'Digital Media Archives and Re/Presenting Social Acceptance of Migration', Conference 'Film and Crisis in Southern Europe', Language Theory and Communication Sciences Department, University of Valencia, Spain, 23-10-2018
Internal Reports
- Demonstration scenario (D1)
- Recommendation/Requirement document (D2)
- Meeting minutes of bi-weekly meetings
- Financial report
- Final report (current document)
- Report of changes in DIVE+ (D5, appendix to Final report)
Workshops organized by the principal investigators:
- Workshop 'Deep Exploration with DIVE+: Discover New Research Questions & Create Narratives with Audio-Visual Sources' CREATE Salon: Digital Search & Storytelling in History, Media Studies Department, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 9-5-2017
- Workshop with History Online students (RUG), Groningen, 10-10-2017
- DH Day presentation + workshop, RUG, Groningen, 26-10-2017
- Winter school workshop, Foggia, Italy on Exploring Media Archives with Digital Search Tools for PhDs and Postdocs 30/31-1-2018
- Lecture + one day workshop Digital Tools in Media Archives, Lithuania 8/9-4-2018
- 2/6-7-2018 CLARIAH Summer School pilot project presentation and workshop
Tutorials or other educational activities organised
- See 'Presentations' and 'Workshops', at both Dutch and international Universities
Deliverables
This project investigates how CLARIAH’s exploratory search and linked open data (LOD) browser DIVE+ supports media researchers to construct narratives about events, especially ‘disruptive’ events such as terrorist attacks and natural disasters. This project approaches this question by conducting user studies to examine how researchers use and create narratives with exploratory search tools, particularly DIVE+, to understand media events. These user studies were organized as workshops (using co-creation as an iterative approach to map search practices and storytelling data, including: focus groups & interviews; tasks & talk aloud protocols; surveys/questionnaires; and research diaries) and included more than 100 (digital) humanities researchers across Europe. Insights from these workshops show that exploratory search does facilitate the development of new research questions around disruptive events. DIVE+ triggers academic curiosity, by suggesting alternative connections between entities. Beside learning about research practices of (digital) humanities researchers and how these can be supported with digital tools, the pilot also culminated in improvements to the DIVE+ browser. The pilot helped optimize the browser’s functionalities, making it possible for users to annotate paths of search narratives, and save these in CLARIAH’s overarching, personalised, user space. The pilot was widely promoted at (inter)national conferences, and DIVE+ won the international LODLAM (Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives and Museums) Challenge Grand Prize in Venice (2017) (see here the winning video and the Summit report: Video & Summit report.
Disruptive narratives made lucid? Co-creation in action: a collaborative example of researchers visualizing the different steps in ‘circling around’ and fine-tuning a research question
(based on DH Day workshop 2017) (discussed further in Hagedoorn & Sauer, forthcoming 2018/2019)
During our project, different (digital) humanities researchers and students visualized exploratory search in mindmaps in user studies sessions, using co-creation as a method for mapping search practices and storytelling data. On the left, a media studies student visualizes exploratory search with the DIVE tool as supporting narrative creation
(discussed further in Hagedoorn & Sauer, forthcoming 2018/2019)
Other
- Victor de Boer, Oana Inel, Lora Aroyo, Chiel van den Akker, Susane Legene, Carlos Martinez, Werner Helmich, Berber Hagedoorn, Sabrina Sauer, Jaap Blom, Liliana Melgar, Johan Oomen. DIVE+: Explorative Search for Digital Humanities. Demonstration at LODLAM Technical challenge. Winner of the Grand Prize, link: YouTube and Lodlam
- Online article 'DIVE+: Exploring Linked Integrated Data', Europeana Insight, September 2017, co-authored by Victor de Boer, Oana Inel, Lora Aroyo, Chiel van den Akker, Susane Legene, Carlos Martinez, Werner Helmich, Berber Hagedoorn, Sabrina Sauer, Jaap Blom, Liliana Melgar and Johan Oomen
- Two MA theses were written about DIVE+ in relation to the user studies performed with the NarDis team. See presentations: presentation A and presentation B.