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Fields of Vision: Toward a New Theory of Visual Literacy for Digitized Archival

Fields of Vision: Toward a New Theory of Visual Literacy for Digitized Archival Photographs PAUL CONWAY and RICARDO PUNZALAN RÉSUMÉ Depuis plus d’une décennie, les archivistes et les chercheurs en archivistique ont étudié les conséquences théoriques et pratiques de la numérisation des documents d’archives visuels. On s’est ainsi penché sur la pertinence de la recherche en alphabéti- sation visuelle (« visual literacy ») dans la pratique de l’archivistique, ainsi que sur les conséquences d’une perte apparente de la valeur intrinsèque, du sens et du contexte découlant du processus de représentation numérique. Ce qui manque le plus dans les perspectives centrées sur l’archiviste et sur le processus est une connaissance profonde de l’expérience de l’usager qui trouve un sens dans les archives visuelles. Cet article présente une nouvelle théorie à multiples facettes sur le sens du visuel, découlant d’études de cas approfondies d’usagers très expérimentés des archives photographiques numérisées. Ce texte contextualise la théorie Champs de vision (« Fields of Vision ») dans la littérature sur l’alphabétisation et la perte matérielle, démontrant que l’usage basé sur le produit englobe les modes de découverte [discovering], de création de narrations [storytelling] et de création de paysages [landscaping] qui sont foncièrement archivistiques dans leur fondement. La numérisation des photographies d’archives créé aussi des variations dans la valeur qu’attribuent les usagers expérimentés aux propriétés matérielles des photographies originales. Ce texte conclue en offrant des conséquences de la théorie Champs de vision sur la recherche future centrée sur les usagers. ABSTRACT For well over a decade, archivists and archival scholars have examined the theoretical and practical implications of digitizing visual records. Significant components of this inquiry include the relevance of visual literacy research to archi- val practice as well as the implications of the apparent loss of intrinsic value, mean- ing, and context through the processes of digital representation. What is missing most prominently from essentially archivist- and process-centric perspectives is a deep understanding of the user experience of finding meaning in visual archives. This article presents a new multi-faceted theory of visual meaning, derived from in-depth case studies of highly experienced users of digitized photographic archives. The paper contextualizes a “Fields of Vision” theory in the literature on literacy and mate- rial loss, demonstrating that product-based use encompasses modes of discovering, storytelling, and landscaping that are fundamentally archival in their construction. The digitization of archival photographs also produces distinctive variation in the value that experienced users place on the material properties of original source photo- graphs. The paper concludes with the implications of the “Fields of Vision” theory for future user-based research. Archivaria 71 (Spring 2011): 63–97 Archivaria, The Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists – All rights reserved Introduction Over a span of just two decades, the creation of collections of “historical digi- tal objects” has transitioned from rarified experiment to nearly ubiquitous activity across both the commercial and the non-profit sectors. Within the cultural heritage community of libraries, archives, and museums, the multi- billion dollar investment in building digital collections from photographic and other cultural resources has been framed by community-based guidelines and best practices developed by tightly circumscribed but overlapping networks of technical experts. Seamus Ross argues compellingly that the resulting libraries of digital content are simultaneously mechanisms for delivering digital surrogates of archival holdings and new archival collections in their own right, reflecting the practices of digital curators throughout the digitiza- tion process. Steven Puglia and Erin Rhodes review digitization practice in the cultural heritage sector and find insufficient progress in gauging the rela- tionship between digitization and user behaviour. They observe, “It is a little humbling to look back and admit that we are still asking many of the difficult questions that we were asking over a decade ago.” The perspectives that determine how users extract meaning from digital surrogates of photographic archives are not well understood, in part because the knowledge gained from user-oriented evaluations of digital libraries and archives is incomplete and inconclusive. Tefko Saracevic reviews more than eighty empirical studies of digital library users and finds only four studies that are based on collections of digital images – all of which focus largely on the retrieval effectiveness of the image delivery system itself. He concludes that a fundamental tension exists between the perspectives of digital library creators and digital library users: “In use, more often than not, digital library users and digital libraries are in an adversarial position.” In a separate study, Saracevic Fiona Cameron, “Beyond the Cult of the Replicant: Museums and Historical Digital Objects – Traditional Concerns, New Discourses,” in Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse, eds. Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine (Cambridge, MA, 2007), p. 49. Melissa M. Terras, Digital Images for the Information Professional (Ashgate, UK, 2008), pp. 15–34. Paul Conway, “Best Practices for Digitizing Photographs: A Network Analysis of Influences,” in Proceedings of IS&T’s Archiving 2008, Berne, 24–27 June 2008, pp. 94– 102. Seamus Ross, “Digital Preservation, Archival Science and Methodological Foundations for Digital Libraries.” Keynote Address at the 11th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL), Budapest, 17 September 2007. Steven Puglia and Erin Rhodes, “Digital Imaging: How Far Have We Come and What Still Needs to Be Done,” RLG DigiNews, vol. 11, no. 1 (15 April 2007), http://www.rlg.org/en/ page.php?Page_ID=21033#article2 (accessed on 27 February 2011.) Tefko Saracevic, “How Were Digital Libraries Evaluated?” Paper first presented at the 64 Archivaria 71 Archivaria, The Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists – All rights reserved examines sixty-four empirical studies of how users of digital systems judge the relevance of the results they obtain. In addition to his insight that relevance studies primarily describe the undergraduate perspective, Saracevic finds that only one study in the past twenty years has anything of merit to say about the use of digitized photographs or other images. In that study, Youngok Choi and Edie Rasmussen explore the formulation of search queries by graduate students and history faculty in the American Memory digital library of the Library of Congress. Krystyna Matusiak also focuses on search and retrieval strategies in an image-based context. The work compares the strategies of undergraduates and the general public, finding strong evidence for distinctive mental models within the two groups. Judith Weedman’s exploratory study of retrieval rele- vance in image-based research, based on a single case, finds that the artificial separation between relevance and actual use, “circumscribes understanding of both.”10 These studies, along with nearly all digital library research in visual collections to date, treat visual images as fixed, controlled objects of retrieval, rather than as evidential sources whose fluidity and variability are themselves factors in the use equation. The field needs research that explores the ways that users extract visual meaning in practice and apply that meaning through “context-dependent and context-sensitive evaluation techniques.”11 We introduce a new model called “Fields of Vision” as a way to illustrate the context and dynamics of access, interpretation, and use of digitized archi- val photographs. The proposed model is the result of a study that examined a group of experienced users of digitized images delivered through the digital library collections of the Library of Congress. By engaging in this research, we hope to contribute to the emerging field of “digital visual literacy” and to advance a more sophisticated view of the impact of digitization on archi- val images. This work derives theory from the articulated experiences and DELOS WP7 Workshop on the Evaluation of Digital Libraries (2004), p. 6. Tefko Saracevic, “Relevance: A Review of the Literature and a Framework for Thinking on the Notion in Information Science. Part III: Behavior and Effects of Relevance,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science, vol. 58, no. 13 (2007), pp. 2126–44. Youngok Choi and Edie M. Rasmussen, “Users’ Relevance Criteria in Image Retrieval in American History,” Information Processing and Management, vol. 38, no. 5 (2002), pp. 695–726. Krystyna K. Matusiak, “Information Seeking Behavior in Digital Image Collections: A Cognitive Approach,” Journal of Academic Librarianship, vol. 32, no. 5 (2006), pp. 479–88. 10 Judith Weedman, “Thinking with Images: An Exploration into Information Retrieval and Knowledge Generation,” Proc. 65th Conference of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 18–21 November 2002, p. 376. 11 Ching-chih Chen, Howard Wactlar, James Z. Wang, and Kevin Kiernan, “Digital Imagery for Significant Cultural and Historical Materials – An Emerging Research Field Bridging People, Culture, and Technologies,” International Journal of Digital Libraries, vol. 5, no. 4 (Special Issue) (2005), pp. 275–86. Toward a New Theory of Visual Literacy for Digitized Archival Photographs 65 Archivaria, The Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists – All rights reserved practices of archival users. The model we offer is a way to depict the multiple approaches that users utilize in engaging with digitized visual archives and the respective meanings they generate as they employ these approaches. By formulating a model based on user experience, we present a fresh outlook on the value of understanding archival users and their role in assessing the impact of digitization on archival use and uploads/Geographie/ j19-conway-punzalan-fields-of-vision-2011-preprint.pdf