Social Presence in Digital Collections

ABSTRACT

Introduction

The collection “Photography Unbound” was assembled by the Getty Research Institute (GRI) to research the application of computer vision. It consists of around 30.000 pre-1925 photographs organized in about 300 bound albums from different institutions and a variety of themes. They range from photograms of plants over travel photography to portraits, often with different early photographic techniques. The images differ in their layout as well. It might be one or multiple photos on a page (and thus image file) and sometimes they are cropped to their actual dimension. This variety and album organization initially got us interested in this collection.

Digital representations of albums are nothing unusual. We still use this organization into subsets (less with a free layout) today on every phone. But as we analyzed the aspects of photo albums we noticed that an integral component of experiencing albums was absent: Social Presence. This formed our main research question on how to integrate means of social presence into digital collection interfaces. Combined with the research happening at the GRI where one focus is the presence of people in the photographs an interesting duality emerges. They are looking into the images and we attempt at looking back from them.

In the following sections we will look further into how social presence is manifested in real life. We will lay out related work as a short history of this concept in interface design. To get a deeper understanding of what could be possible and also exists in different contexts already we will propose a framework for social presence in digital interfaces. Based on those components we will present our own screen designs and a prototype for a “Photography Unbound” collection interface.

Social Presence in Real Life

As the collection is explicitly one of albums and their photographs within we took the physical album as a starting point. Albums have no overview, we have to view them page by page. They are mostly organized by a theme with no subsections. Further information about the photographs might be found on the back of them or notated on the page. The layout might be important as well and rearrangement is usually not done or even possible. Experiencing an album often means more than just looking through it. It is a social occasion as well where we sit together with friends or family. We have to collectively agree when to turn the page; someone might point out a detail on an image; another person might be telling a story and goes backwards to bring a reference to mind again. All this forms our understanding and experience of this specific kind of collection which should be taken into account when designing one in the digital space.

This social behavior is integral to other real life collection spaces as well and mostly missing from their digital counterparts. A visit to the museum is always connected to social cues we send and receive, voluntarily and involuntarily. Based on those cues we might avoid a packed crowd in front of an object, or go there just because of it, as this object has to be amazing. We might adjust our pacing to some people next to us, or speed up because they are annoying. Maybe there is someone explaining the object to friends which we overhear and decide to go back because we previously did not quite get it without context. A person standing nearby might be wondering about a detail and we point out a similar object in the previous room.

Related Work

In the 1945 article “As we may Think” Vannevar Bush [1] proposes some of the earliest ideas of information organized through associative linking to create “trails” which can be shared with other people. This article directly inspired the onset of Human-Computer interaction and hypertext, fundamentals of the World Wide Web, through Douglas Engelbart [2] and Ted Nelson [3] in 1962/63.

Navigational ideas of the early web before the proliferation of search engines in the mid-90s mainly revolved around users sharing their personal link lists directly via E-Mail, message boards or on their own webpage to close contacts, people with similar interests or the general public respectively. Another aspect would be collaborative filtering which consisted of recommendation systems based for example on popularity or ratings which are still very relevant for today’s browsing habits. This lead to the differentiation into three navigational models by Dourish and Chalmers [4]: semantic, spatial and social navigation. The latter further developed by Erickson [5], Dieberger [6], Höök, Wexelblatt and Maes [7] among others in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Since that time the navigational aspects haven’t found much attention although the technical possibilities developed further. The main applications of social principles have shifted to collaborative work and recommendation systems with a parallel continuation of message boards in form of modern social media. More research also went into online learning (e.g. Social Presence Theory [8]) closely connected with different social sciences.

One other field of research is computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW). This is very much at the foundation of creating the technology involved which allows multiple people to work together digitally. A great paper summarizing a lot of aspects of this field is by Lee and Paine [9]. Although CSCW shares integral parts with social navigation they define it as „[…] working towards a particular goal through one or more overlapping fields of action.“

The use of social presence especially in collection interfaces is currently quite limited despite technical advancements and its inherent emergence in the real world as evidenced in the previous section. We identify a gap in research, prototypes and bold applications between more commonly used recommendation systems and simulations of museum visits in virtual reality.