Week 36

Summary:

This week, we installed the Abel Prize touch table application in the Science Library, in time for a variety of events organized related to Yves Meyer’s Abel Lecture in the UiO university library. During the first days, the application was utilized by 10-20 library users per day. Based on its initial use, we subsequently carried out some improvements and bug-fixes.

Specific activities, including:

• In time for the Abel Prize lecture by Yves Meyer, the Abel breakfast, a lecture about his work and a movie screening, we installed the Abel Prize-themed touch table in the foyer of the Science Library
  • The application has the following possibilities, visualized using static and animated interface elements:
    • Exploring the Abel Prize winners of the last five years (2013-2017)
    • Finding contextual information, biographies, related ebooks and videos about each prize winner
    • Finding background information about the Abel Prize
  • We used lessons learned in our previous touch table application related to Hidden Figures, we have enhanced our infrastructure and workflow:
    • It is now possible to use ‘swipe’ navigation between years (from previous usage logs it turned out this feature was expected by users)
    • We improved our workflows with respect to designing the application (using Sketch, a separate program), thus quickly translating it into an interactive Application
    • We improved the analytics, so we get more accurate usage statistics to improve navigation and content
    • A “touch me” introduction screen was added, which invites passers-by to interact with the application
    • Some slight adjustments to the book-viewer: books appear larger so the are more easily readable
    • We added a “headphone” icon to the videos, so users are prompted to utilize the headphones located directly beneath the table edge, and some contextual information about the video
    • We made a clearer distinction between clickable icons and static interface elements. We also created distinct icons for books, documents, and videos.
    • This time, we predominantly used white text on black backgrounds, since this works better with the touch table’s screen (which has relatively low contrast)
  • Future work: creating a version of the application which can be utilized on other devices than the touch table and outside the university (necessitating a preview-only approach for the included e-books)

Application screenshots:

• Activities related to the upcoming Library Carpentry workshop on data processing and visualization in June (Hugo)
  • Further surveying existing visualization literature and testing data processing and visualization tools (Google Sheets, RAW, OpenRefine, Plot.ly)
  • Updating the website and participants lists (Elin)