Manuel Burghardt

TWORPUS - An Easy-to-Use Tool for the Creation of Tailored Twitter Corpora

In this paper we present Tworpus, an easy-to-use tool for the creation of tailored Twitter corpora. Tworpus allows scholars to create corpora without having to know about the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) and related technical aspects. At the same time our tool complies with Twitter’s ”rules of the road” on how to use tweet data. Corpora may be composed in various sizes and for specific scenarios, as the Tworpus interface provides controls for filtering and gathering customized collections of tweets, which may serve as the basis for subsequent analyses.

Evaluating a web-based tool for crowdsourced navigation stress tests

We present a web-based tool for evaluating the information architecture of a website. The tool allows the use of crowdsourcing platforms like Amazons MTurk as a means for recruiting test persons, and to conduct asynchronous remote navigation stress tests (cf. Instone 2000). We also report on an evaluation study which compares our tool-based crowdsourced approach to a more traditional laboratory test setting. Results of this comparison indicate that although there are interesting differences between the two testing approaches, both lead to similar test results.

Annotationsergonomie: Design-Empfehlungen für linguistische Annotationswerkzeuge

Dieser Beitrag skizziert die Kluft, die zwischen linguistischen Annotationswerkzeugen einerseits, und etablierten Methoden des Usability Engineering anderseits, besteht. Eine Evaluationsstudie dreier weit verbreiteter Annotationstools offenbart unterschiedliche Kategorien von Usability-Problemen, auf deren Basis eine Sammlung von 28 Design-Empfehlungen fur benutzerfreundliche Annotationswerkzeuge vorgeschlagen werden.

Allegro: User-centered Design of a Tool for the Crowdsourced Transcription of Handwritten Music Scores

In this paper, we describe the challenge of transcribing a large corpus of handwritten music scores. We conducted an evaluation study of three existing optical music recognition (OMR) tools. The evaluation results indicate that OMR approaches do not work well for our corpus of highly heterogeneous, handwritten music scores. For this reason, we designed Allegro, a web-based crowdsourcing tool that can be used to transcribe scores. We relied on a user-centered design process throughout the development cycle of the application, to ensure a high level of usability. The interface was designed in a way it can be used intuitively, even by novices of musical notation. We describe the core features of Allegro and the basic transcription workflow. A first public beta test with 18 users shows that a crowdsourced transcription approach via the Allegro tool is a viable option for the encoding of our corpus of folk songs.

An Information System for the Analysis ofColor Distributions in MovieBarcodes

We present an ongoing project from the field of quantitative film studies, sometimes also referred to as Cinemetrics (Tsivian, 2009). Most of the related work in this area is focused on quantitative analyses of shot lengths and distributions. In this paper, we suggest color as an additional quantitative parameter for movie analysis and describe an information system that allows scholars to search for movies via their specific color distribution. As a source of condensed movie color information, we make use of the MovieBarcode database. A MovieBarcode is created by skewing each frame of a movie to be only 1 pixel wide. Lining up all these frames in a row creates a barcode-like visualization of the most dominant colors in a movie (fig. 1). Our information system makes use of the color diff 4 library to map more than 1,500

Usability Pattern Identification Through Heuristic Walkthroughs

Patterns are a popular means to document design knowledge in different fields of application, including HCI. Accordingly, a large number of different HCI pattern formats have been suggested. However, relatively little is said about how to systematically identify such patterns. In order to make the process of identifying patterns more transparent and comprehensible, I apply a usability inspection method to generate data that can be used as input for the systematic creation of usability patterns. This article describes the basic idea of identifying usability patterns through a series of heuristic walkthroughs and illustrates the approach by means of a case study in the field of “linguistic annotation tools”.

Informationswissenschaft und Digital Humanities

Dieser Beitrag beschreibt das Verhaltnis zwischen Informationswissenschaft und Digital Humanities und zeigt dabei viele Anknupfungspunkte und Parallelen zwischen den beiden Disziplinen auf. Weiterhin wird am Beispiel ausgewahlter Forschungsthemen und ‐methoden der Informationswissenschaft aufgezeigt, wo das Fach Angebote an die Geisteswissenschaft machen kann, um innovative Digital Humanities-Projekte zu befordern.

Zentren für Digital Humanities in Deutschland

Dieser Artikel thematisiert den Bedarf fur und die Anforderungen an Informationsinfrastrukturen fur die Geisteswissenschaften. Im Vorfeld wurden die Verantwortlichen dreier etablierter Digital Humanities-Zentren (Trier Center for Digital Humanities, Cologne Center for eHumanities, Gottingen Centre for Digital Humanities) in Deutschland gebeten, insgesamt 16 Fragen zu wesentlichen Charakteristika und Funktionen zu beantworten, und so einen kurzen Steckbrief der jeweiligen Institution zu erstellen. Auf Basis dieser Steckbriefe erfolgt ein Uberblick zu Digital Humanities-Zentren in Deutschland, der im Wesentlichen die Bereiche (1) Struktur und Genese, (2) Profil, Aufgaben und Dienste, (3) Nutzer, Vernetzung und Projekte und schlieslich (4) Ausblick und Strategie naher betrachtet. Der Artikel schliest mit einem Fazit zur aktuellen Situation der Informationsinfrastruktur in den digitalen Geisteswissenschaften und stellt daruber hinaus einige Betrachtungen zur kunftigen Weiterentwicklung des Themas an. This article takes into account the need for information infrastructure in the digital humanities and discusses requirements for such infrastructure. Previously, we asked three existing centers for digital humanities in Germany (Trier Center for Digital Humanities, Cologne Center for eHumanities, Gottingen Centre for Digital Humanities) to answer a set of 16 questions about the specific characteristics and functions of their institution. This information was used to create an overview of digital humanities centers in Germany that addresses the following areas: (1) Structure and development, (2) profile, functions and services, (3) users, networks and projects, and (4) future perspectives and strategy. At the end of the article we provide a conclusion and discuss the future prospects for digital humanities centers.

A Crowdsourced Approach for the Documentation and Transcription of Graffiti in Public Restrooms

In this short paper we introduce graffiti in public restrooms – also known as latrinalia – as a promising object of research. We present an application that uses crowdsourcing techniques to upload and transcribe images of latrinalia on a public web site. This article describes the basic design and functions of the application, presents the status quo of the current dataset, and also gives an outlook on the next steps and future work.

Usability guidelines for desktop search engines

In this article we describe a usability evaluation of eight desktop search engines (DSEs). We used the heuristic walkthrough method to gather usability problems as well as individual strengths and weaknesses of the tested search engines. The results of the evaluation are integrated into a set of 30 design guidelines for user-friendly DSEs.