Projects – Joss Winn

LNCD, DevXS and Orbital

Joss Winn / September 9, 2011 / Funding, Projects

It’s been a busy summer, to say the least.

The DIVERSE project is up and running and the Linking You and Jerome projects came to a successful end. We were joined by Jamie Mahoney, a new full-time Web Developer Intern and established a new group (LNCD). We’re co-organising a national student developer conference (DevXS) and have just been awarded a £241,500 grant for Orbital, an 18 month project to develop and pilot a new research infrastructure for the School of Engineering. Orbital is a great opportunity to build on some of our earlier work and get stuck into the challenges of managing raw research data. Which reminds me: data.lincoln.ac.uk is live, too 🙂

Please do tell your students about DevXS.

Orbital: A proposed Managing Research Data project

Joss Winn / July 28, 2011July 28, 2011 / Funding, Projects

Following my usual tradition, I am dutifully posting a bid document that I submitted today to JISC’s Managing Research Data Programme. As you might already know, I do this in an attempt to open up the process of bid writing a bit more, in what is normally a competitive environment. I also hope that it might attract some interest from and possible future collaboration with other people in the university sector, whether we are successful in winning funding or not. We’ve been pretty successful with our bids over the last couple of years, too, and have received good feedback from JISC on the quality of our bids, so it seems like the decent thing to share good practice.

Our proposed project is called Orbital because we’re intending to build services for managing research data that ‘orbit’ around Nucleus, the data store we built during the Total Recal and Jerome projects. The bid was a pretty easy one to write, to be honest. Everything felt right as soon as I read the call documentation because I could see a way of re-using and further developing the work we’ve been doing since I joined the university in 2007. Of course, we’ve set ourselves some new challenges with this project and much work needs to be done in all phases of the project, but having the experience of building web services around large institutional data sets, gives me the confidence that we can tackle what is a really important issue for us – for any university: managing a growing body of research data. It’s also a project that takes me back to my roots, having joined the university to work on our Institutional Repository project. Prior to that I was an Archivist at the BFI National Film and Television Archive and Project Manager for the development of Amnesty International’s Digital Asset Management system. It was good to revisit the the whole digital archiving domain again and I even re-discovered a blog I kept in 2006 while on JISC’s week-long Digital Preservation Training Programme.

Although the bid has been sent off now, and who knows whether it will be funded or not, the process of writing the bid has been really useful. I had planned to spend much of July drafting a journal paper but seeing the call, switched into bid writing mode. Writing bids regularly, I try to get something out of them, despite knowing that they may not be funded. The idea of retrospectively viewing unfunded bids as a waste of time would depress the hell out of me and so I try to approach it as a reflective process, where I talk with colleagues about what we’ve done, where were are now and where we want to go with our work. Through writing this bid, it became really clear how the work we’ve been doing on other projects has brought us to the point where we have a good team of people who have developed a very modern, extensible and flexible technical framework which we can deploy in a number of domains, including managing research data. It’s all in the bid, so I won’t repeat it here, but it’s something we should be proud of.

I think that one of the things that good developers do is identify and/or build the tools they need to do their job effectively. That’s what we’ve been doing with WordPress, the Common Web Design, OAuth, Nucleus, data dot lincoln, the Jerome discovery tool and the Linking You toolkit, so that now we have the skills and the tools to tackle future work more efficiently and have fun, too. There’s nothing that kills the fun of development more than having to work with crap tools.

Two new JISC-funded projects

Joss Winn / January 21, 2011 / Fun, Funding, ICT, Projects, Software, Web

Just a short note to record that in the last week, I’ve been informed that both our recent bids to JISC will be funded. The projects start on February 1st, just as Total ReCal is formally closing. As you can imagine, we’re all extremely pleased to be able to undertake this work over the next few months and are grateful for the backing that the funding provides.

Here are summaries of the project bids. You can read the full bid documents by clicking on the links.

Linking You << get it? ‘Lincoln U’ :-) (Google doc) (blog)

Like most other HEIs, Lincoln’s web presence has grown ‘organically’ over the years, utilising a range of authoring and content management technologies to satisfy long-term business requirements while meeting the short-term demands of staff and students. We recognise the value of our .ac.uk domain as an integral part of our ‘Learning Landscape’ and, building on recent innovations in our Online Services Team, intend to re-evaluate the overall underlying architecture of our websites with a range of stakeholders and engage with others in the sector around the structure, persistence and use of the open data we publish on the web. Some preliminary work has already been undertaken in this area and we wish to use this opportunity to consolidate what we have learned as well as inform our own work through a series of wider consultations and engagement with the JISC community.

Jerome (Google doc) (blog)

Jerome began in the summer of 2010, as an informal ‘un-project’, with the aim of radically integrating data available to the University of Lincoln’s library services and offering a uniquely personalised service to staff and students through the use of new APIs, open data and machine learning. Jerome addresses many of the challenges highlighted in the Resource Discovery Taskforce report, including the need to develop scale at the data and user levels, the use of third-party data and services and a better understanding of ‘user journeys’. Here, we propose to formalise Jerome as a project, consolidating the lessons we have learned over the last few months by developing a sustainable, institutional service for open bibliographic metadata, complemented with well documented APIs and an ‘intelligent’, personalised interface for library users.

The Virtual Studio

Joss Winn / September 21, 2008March 2, 2010 / Conferences, Open Access, Projects, Repositories, Software

I am in Venice to present a paper with two colleagues from the School of Architecture, at a two-day conference organised by the Metadata for Architectural Materials in Europe (MACE) Project. Yesterday was a significant day, for reasons I want to detail below. Skip to the end of this long post, if you just want to know the outcome and why this conference has been an important and positive turning point in the Virtual Studio project.

I joined the university just over a year ago to work on the JISC-funded LIROLEM Project:

The Project aimed to lay the groundwork for the establishment of an Institutional Repository that supports a wide variety of non-textual materials, e.g. digital animations of 3-D models, architectural documentation such as technical briefings and photographs, as well as supporting text based materials. The project arose out of the coincidental demands for the University to develop a repository of its research outputs, and a specific project in the school of Architecture to develop a “Virtual Studio”, a web based teaching resource for the school of Architecture.

At the end of the JISC-funded period, I wrote a lengthy summary on the project blog, offering a personal overview of our achievements and challenges during the course of the project. Notably, I wrote:

The LIROLEM Project was tied to a Teaching Fellowship application by two members of staff in the School of Architecture. Their intentions were, and still are, to develop a Virtual Studio which compliments the physical design Studio. Although the repository/archive functionality is central to the requirements of the Virtual Studio, rather than being the primary focus of the Studio, a ‘designerly’, dynamic user interface that encourages participation and collaboration is really key to the success of the Studio as a place for critical thinking and working. In effect, the actual repository should be invisible to the Architect who has little interest, patience or time for the publishing workflow that EPrints requires. More often that not, the Architects were talking about wiki-like functionality, that allowed people to rapidly generate new Studio spaces, invite collaboration, bring in multimedia objects such as plans, images and models, offer comment, discussion and critique. As student projects developed in the Virtual Studio, finished products could be archived and showcased inviting another round of comment, critique and possibly derivative works from a wider community outside the classroom Studio.

Our conference paper discussed the difficulties of ensuring that the (minority) interests of the Architecture staff were met while trying to gain widespread institutional support and sustainability for the Institutional Repository which the LIROLEM project aimed, and had an obligation, to achieve. During the presentation (below), we asked:

Can academics and students working in different disciplines be easily accommodated within the same archival space?

MACE Presentation

View more presentations from Joss Winn.

Our presentation slides. My bicycle is a reference to Bijker (1997)

The paper argues that advances in technology result from complex and often conflicting social interests. Within the context of the LIROLEM Project, it was the wider interests of the Institution which took precedence, rather than the minority interests of the Architectural staff. I’m not directing criticism towards decisions made during the project; after all, I made many of them so as to ensure the long-term sustainability of the repository, but yesterday we argued that

architecture is an atypical discipline; its emphasis is more visual than literary, more practice than research-based and its approach to teaching and learning is more fluid and varied than either the sciences or the humanities (Stevens, 1998). If we accept that it is social interests that underlie the development of technology rather than any inevitable or rational progress (Bijker, 1997), the question arises as to what extent an institutional repository can reconcile architectural interests with the interests of other disciplines. Architecture and the design disciplines are marginal actors in the debate surrounding digital archive development, this paper argues, and they bring problems to the table that are not easily resolved given available software and that lie outside the interests of most other actors in academia.

Prior to the conference, I was unsure of what to do next about the Virtual Studio. I felt that the repository was the wrong application for supporting a collaborative studio environment for architects. Central to this was the unappealing deposit and cataloguing workflow in the IR and the general aesthetic of the user interface which, despite some customisation, does not appeal to designers’ expectations of a visual tool for the deposit and discovery of architectural materials.

However, the MACE Project appears to have just come to our rescue with the development of tools that query OAI-PMH data mapped to their LOM profile, enriches the harvested metadata (by using external services such as Google Maps and collecting user generated tags, for example) and provides a social platform for searching participating repositories. I managed to ask several questions throughout the day to clarify how the anticipated architectural content in our repository could be exposed to MACE. My main concern was our issue of having a general purpose Institutional Repository, but wanting to handle subject-specific (architecture) content in a unique way. I was told that the OAI-PMH has a ‘set‘ attribute which could be used to isolate the architectural content in the IR for harvesting by MACE. Another question related to the building of defined communities or groups within the larger MACE community (i.e. students on a specific course) and was told that this is a feature they intend to implement.

Because of the work of MACE, the development of a search interface and ‘studio’ community platform has largely been done for us (at least to the level of expectation we ever had for the project). Ironically, we came to the conference questioning the use of the IR as the repository for the Virtual Studio, but now believe that we may benefit from the interoperability of the IR, despite suffering some of its other less appealing attributes. One of the things that remains for us to do, is improve the deposit experience to ensure we collect content that can be exposed to the MACE platform.

For this, I hope we can develop a SWORD tool that simplifies the deposit process for staff and students, reducing the work flow process down to the two or three brief steps you find on Flickr or YouTube, repositories they are likely to be familar with and judge others against. User profile data could be collected from their LDAP login information and they would be asked to title, describe and tag their work. A default BY-NC-ND Creative Commons license would be chosen for them, which they could opt out of (but consequently also opt out of MACE harvesting, too).

Boris Müller, who works on the MACE project, spoke yesterday of the “joy of interacting with [software] interfaces.” This has clearly been a central concern of the MACE project as it has been for the Virtual Studio project, too. I’m looking forward to developing a simple but appealing interface that can bring at least a little joy to my architect colleagues and their students.