Exhibit update

Results are in from the audience testing of our first exhibit prototype: View here (over on the exhibit meetings page)

The prototype presented was a basic interactive map of Bradford with datapoints as a layer, the option to navigate through 150 years of Bradford history, four different base maps, and two historic stories mocked up for visitor interaction. Each story has a ‘data state’ and a ‘story state’ where visitors can either explore the raw data associated with a point in Bradfords history, or they can click through a curated narrative.

Dwell time was promising, at an average of 2 - 7 minutes before the other twenty stories and seven techniques are even in the interactive. Stamen will be continuing to develop their design over the next four weeks, with prototype two testing scheduled for the first few weeks of October. This stage of testing will use the same audience researcher, but will focus on audiences in Bradford - who we hope are even more compelled by a map of their local area.

Writing

OCR chapter writing is going well, with a strong historic framing from Max, cultural heritage context from Anna-Maria, and then three case studies each problematising a different stage of the traditional OCR workflow. These include a trade directories focus on pre-processing from Felix and Daniel, a text recognition discussion focused on RAG by myself and Nayomi, and finally a post-processing experiment with pollution data from Max and I (Max is really doing the lion’s-share of that one).

The computer vision chapter is mostly on pause while Kaspar and I continue work with Heritage Weaver, but today I enjoyed being the curatorial guineapig in the database. I have been going through lists of objects that the tool thinks either link based on the way they look or the way they are described. As ever with this investigation, the question ‘what actually is linkage’ is pertinent. I’ll be organising a group annotation workshop when I am back in a week’s time, so look forward to sharing more updates with you all then. In the meantime, here’s a quick image of two linked objects in the NMS and SMG collection - rather cool!