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Title:
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Zoomable Map Interface Collection Sensemaking System (ZooMICSS) |
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Scholar:
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Ross A. Graeber |
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School:
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Texas A&M University (College Station) |
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Mentor:
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Dr. Andruid Kerne |
[View Presentation ( 627 KB)] |
The Zoomable Map Interface Collection Sensemaking System (ZooMICSS) is being used as part of a larger project involving both the Sociology and Computer Science departments at Texas A&M University. The project involves building a cultural center for evacuees and online services for those displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. ZooMICSS will be used to both gather and present the online resources. It is also an integral part of the interview process to gather information for the building of the cultural center. In future projects ZooMICSS will be used as a component of an Ethnographic Workbench; a software package for ethnographers to assist in the capture, interpretation, and connection of information they gather in the field and analyze in the lab.
ZooMICSS is software used for acquisition, organization, and viewing large media collections. ZooMICSS aids users in making sense of large collections of images with Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates. Sensemaking is the process through which humans put together understanding of related information. Collection sensemaking involves understanding a collection of media entities as a whole. One example of a sensemaking task is to compare the damage from Hurricane Katrina to homes, personal effects, and community buildings in different areas of New Orleans.
Images taken with a digital camera are tagged with GPS coordinates and other information (such as time and camera settings), then stored in a repository. These images are then organized into clusters based on their temporal and location data. After this, the images can be called up in a web interface , which consists of a zoomable map, based off of Google Maps, and a system for viewing the images and their attached data.
Over 255 images of New Orleans (post-Katrina) are stored in the system and are viewable through the web interface. Over the summer, the Web Interface was presented to various organizations for review. Community outreach groups such as Project Unity have given their endorsement of the project as a tool that would benefit the evacuee community. These organizations have also provided feedback for the improvement of the system. ZooMICSS was also used by groups of evacuees. They were allowed to browse the web system and comment on the collection, and were interviewed and given feedback questionnaires. The data from these user studies guide further development of the system.
Experiments will be run late in the summer into early in the fall with the system to determine how much more effective ZooMICSS is as a means for making sense of large collections, as opposed to other commercially available systems, such as Picassa. In addition, ZooMICSS will be presented as a demo at the 2006 Multimedia Conference in Santa Barbara California.