cameras « The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

It is really easy, during the course of graduate school, to let a great many things in our lives fall by the wayside. There’s always something to read, a constant stream of emails, projects to plan, and mountains of data to plow through. Oral exams, proposal meetings, all of the writing…most days it piles on until we have to put “EAT LUNCH!!!” on our to-do lists to make sure we don’t pass out from hunger. We spend so much time on being a graduate student that we lose site of the fact that we are people who have needs beyond the next peer reviewed article.

There are lots of places where people have expounded on the importance of sleep and healthy eating for optimal brain function, but there’s more to being healthy than just those. Whole person health requires that we spend some of our time on activities that fulfill some portion of our broader identity than just “grad student.” I specifically mean hobbies, the rejuvenating experiences that remind us of who we are and what we want out of life. Sadly, these are usually the first things to get cut from our overburdened schedules. (I’m only going to mention in passing that there are also horrible people who will say that having hobbies is a “waste of time.” Personally, I think these people are a “waste of space” and won’t give them any more of my time).

I know from experience that I go a special kind of nuts if I go too long without indulging in one of my hobbies. That’s why I endeavor to

have a knitting project with me at all times. I can usually manage to squeeze in a row or two to help “take the edge off” during the day.

But, just as we stagnate if we don’t move forward with our research, I had begun to feel stagnant in the rest of my life. Get up, do work, read things, knit some, play with the cat, eat, and sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat. And, since I’m a whole person, when I feel stagnant or restricted in one area of my life, it has a ripple effect through the rest.

For as long as I can remember I’ve had an interest in and affinity for photography. I had plastic 110mm cameras as a child, bought my first SLR at 17, drove my mother nuts with the amounts of film I went through, and I collect vintage cameras.

Last weekend we had our annual lab retreat, and we went “camping” at a state park a little west of Portland (we stayed in cabins with electricity and heat and had proper meals, which is as close as I’m willing to get to actual camping). I brought along my little camera (Canon PhotoShot Elph 100HS). This has been my primary camera since August 2011, and I’ve done some spectacular photography with it (considering its limitations). At the retreat, I had the opportunity to shoot a few frames with a friend’s Canon SLR and folks, it ignited a fire in me that is still burning. Yesterday I checked out 17 items on digital photography from our local library (libraries are perhaps the greatest FCL resource available, and yet so under sung).

I feel energized, awake (awake helps), and there’s so much energy it’s surging through to the grad student part of my life. Because that’s the trick about whole person health. You can’t feel great if there’s a part of of your life that isn’t working out. And I know that graduate school (like so many things) requires compromise and sacrifice, but we shouldn’t have to compromise our identities or sacrifice our happiness.

Now all that’s left is to read/watch all of these in the 2-4 weeks I have them on loan…anyone know how to bend time?

Members of the Cyberlab were busy this week. We set up the multi touch table and touch wall in the Visitors Center and hosted Kate Haley Goldman as a guest researcher. In preparation for her visit, there were modifications to camera and table placement, tinkering with microphones, and testing the data collection pieces by looking at the video playback. It was a great opportunity to evaluate our lab setup for other incoming researchers and their data collection needs, and to try things live with the technology of Ideum!

Kate traveled from Washington D.C. to collect data on the interactive content by Open Exhibits displayed on our table. As the Principal of Audience Viewpoints, Kate conducts research on audiences and learning in museums and informal learning centers. She is investigating the use of multi touch technology in these settings, and we are thankful for her insight as we implement this exhibit format at Hatfield Marine Science Center.

Watching the video playback of visitor interactions with Kate was fascinating. We discussed flow patterns around the room based on table placement. We looked at the amount of stay time at the table depending on program content. As the day progressed, more questions came up. How long were visitors staying at the other exhibits, which have live animals, versus the table placed nearby? While they were moving about the room, would visitors return to the table multiple times? What were the demographics of the users? Were they bringing their social group with them? What were the users talking about? Was it the technology itself or the content on the table? Was the technology intuitive to use?

I felt the thrill of the research process this weekend. It was a wonderful opportunity to “observe the observer” and witness Kate in action. I enjoyed seeing visitor use of the table and thinking about the interactions between humans and technology. How effective is it to present science concepts in this format and are users learning something? I will reflect on this experience as I design my research project around science learning and the use of multi touch technology in an informal learning environment such as Hatfield Marine Science Center.

Last week I returned a few purchased Cyberlab cameras back to the store. Some were already taken off the exhibits and a couple others were just removed from the computer kiosks at the wave laboratory. Apparently they were not working well as images were coming through very blurry.

I wonder how much of the problem had to do with visitor interactions…WAIT…everything at a visitor center has to do with visitor interactions doesn’t it? The shape of the little camera stroked me as very inviting of the oily digits exploring the visitor center everyday. We all know visitors love to push buttons, so what happens when a camera placed at eye level at a computer kiosk looks like a button? … CORRECT, it gets pushed and pushed many times, and the finger oils get transferred to the lenses (that is a possibility). I can only imagine the puzzled looks of visitors waiting for something to happen, what would the “button” activate?

It didn’t activate anything but a little frustration on our prototyping side as we continue to seek optimal interfaces to obtain great quality video for our learning research goals while maintaining the aesthetically pleasing characteristic of the exhibits. Jenny East, Megan Kleibacker, Mark Farley and I walked around the visitor center to evaluate how many more cameras we need to buy and install keeping the old, new and oncoming exhibits in mind. How many more and what type of cameras to buy depended on the possible locations for hook ups, the surfaces available for mounting and the angles we need to capture images from. Below is a VC camera map and a screen capture of the camera overview to give a better idea.

HMSC VC Camera Map

Screen Shot

While this is all a challenge to figure out, a bigger challenge is to find and/or create mounting mechanisms that are safe and look good. Camera encasing systems that minimize visitor touch and avoid any physical contact with the lenses. These will probably have to be custom built to fit every particular mounting location, at least that would be ideal. But how do we make it functional? how do we make it blend within the exhibits and be aesthetically pleasing at the same time? It may seem easy to think about but not so easy to accomplish, at least not if you don’t have all the money in the world, and certainly not at the push of a button.

Nevertheless, with “patience in the process” as Jenny talked about in her blog last week, as well as practicing some “hard thinking” as Shawn discussed a few blogs ago, we will keep evolving through our camera set up, pushing all of the buttons technology allows us to push while working collaboratively to optimize the ways in which we can collect good data in the saga of understanding what really pushes the visitors’ curiosity buttons… towards ocean sciences.

Having more time to do research, of course! With the pressures and schedules of classes over, students everywhere are turning to a dedicated stretch of research work, either on their own theses and dissertations, or for paid research jobs, or internships. That means, with Laura and I graduating, there should be a new student taking over the Cyberlab duties soon. However, the other thing that summer means is the final push to nail down funding for the fall, and thus, our replacement is not yet actually identified.

In the meantime, though, Laura and I have managed to do a pretty thorough soup-t0-nuts inventory of the lab’s progress over the last couple years for the next researchers to hopefully pick up and run with:

Technology: Cameras are pretty much in and running smoothly. Laura and I have worked a lot of the glitches out, and I think we have the installation down to a relatively smooth system of placing a camera, aligning it, and installing it physically, then setting it up on the servers and getting it set for everyone’s use. I’ve got a manual down that I think spells out the process start to finish. We’ve also got expanded network capability coming in the form of our own switch, which should help traffic.

Microphones, however, are a different story. We are still torn between installing mics in our lovely stone exhibitry around the touch tanks or just going with what the cameras pick up with built-in mics. The tradeoff is between damaging the rock enclosure or having clearer audio not garbled by the running water of the exhibit. We may be able to hang mics from the ceiling, but that testing will be left to those who follow. It’s less of a crucial point right now, however, as we don’t have any way to automate audio processing.

Software development for facial recognition is progressing as our Media Macros contractors are heading to training on the new system they are building into our overall video analysis package. Hopefully we’ll have that in testing this next school year.

Eye-tracking is really ironed out, too. We have a couple more issues to figure out around tracking on the Magic Planet in particular, but otherwise even the stand-alone tracking is ready to go, and I have trained a couple folks on how to run studies. Between that and the manuals I compiled, hopefully that’s work that can continue without much lag and certainly without as much learning time as it took me to work out a lot of kinks.

Exhibit-wise, the wave tanks are all installed and getting put through their paces with the influx of end-of-year school groups. Maybe even starting to leak a little bit as the wear-and-tear kicks in. We are re-conceptualizing the climate change exhibit and haven’t started planning the remodeling of the remote-sensing exhibit room and Magic Planet. Those two should be up for real progress this year, too.

Beyond that, pending IRB approval due any day for the main video system, we should be very close to collecting research data. We planned a list of things that we need to look at for each of the questions in the grant, and there are pieces that the new researcher can get started on right away to start groundtruthing the use of video observations to study exhibits as well as answering questions about the build-and-test nature of the tsunami wave tank. We have also outlined a brief plan for managing the data as I mentioned a couple posts ago.

That makes this my last post as research assistant for the lab. Stay tuned; you’re guaranteed to hear from the new team soon. You might even hear from me as I go forth and test using the cameras from the other side of the country!

Just a few quick updates on this holiday about how lab is progressing.

-We’re re-thinking our microphone options for the touch tanks. We’re reluctant to drill into our permanent structure to run wires, so we’re back to considering whether the in-camera microphones will be sufficient or whether we can put in wireless mics. With the placement of the cameras to get a wide angle for the interactions and the loud running water, the in-camera mics will probably be too far away for clear audio pickup, but the wireless mics require their own receivers and audio channels. The number of mics we’d want to install could rapidly exceed the amount of frequency space available. Oh, and there’s the whole splashing water issue – mics are not generally waterproof.

-We finally got a lot more internet bandwidth installed, but now we have to wait for on-campus telecommunications to install a switch. We’re creeping ever closer … and once that’s done, we can hopefully re-up the frame rate on our cameras. Hopefully we’ll also be able to export footage more easily, especially remotely, as well. I’ll be testing this out myself as part of my new job and future research.

-I installed a NAS network drive of five 2 TB hard drives that will probably be our backup system. It needed about 40 hours to configure itself, so next week we should hopefully be able to get it fully in place.

-We took the whole system down for about an hour to replace the UPS as the old one was just shot.

-We’re looking into scheduling to accommodate school groups that don’t give permission for taping, as well as evening events. This should be possible through the Milestone Management software, but it’s not something we’ve explored yet.

-Remote desktop access to the servers is next (hopefully). This is also waiting on the campus telecom network switch.

-We’re migrating our exhibit software from Flash to HTML 5 in order to be more easily updated as well as incorporating the key/screen press logging code.

Happy Memorial Day!

Lining up these ducks is definitely not sexy research work, yet it’s often very important, as Laura mentioned last week. Ideally, this would have been done from the beginning. It was to some extent, but mostly with what was new coming in rather than taking stock also of what we already have.

The same will probably be true of the data that the lab collects, but since we haven’t really started collecting any new data, we can hopefully be proactive about how we integrate the old and the new. We’re building on previous work, such as video analysis of the touch tanks, where a corpus of data already exists. That means we have (perhaps) an existing data management structure, or not, but we need to find out.

I recently attended a great workshop from the OSU Library on data management plans. For this grant, we promised not only to share our experiences with this project as we go, but also to share our data to the extent possible, especially with our visiting scholars. Funders are also requiring plans for storing and managing data, and there is also a larger push for much federally-funded data to be shared in open-access databases. Even without these prods, managing data saves time in the long run by keeping information organized and easy-to-access. One of the tools they recommend is DMP Tool, which has many templates from different funders to create the plans for grant applications in the first place.

Once you’ve been awarded the grant, planning file names and creating meta-data up-front can ensure things are easy to find, easy to share, and easy to manage. That’s where we are. As we start to plan exactly what research questions we pursue first, we’ll figure exactly what types of data we’ll be collecting. As we are working with Media Macros to set up analytic programs to parse the video data, we will be able to designate how we want our file names to be constructed for example to indicate the date and time and type of data, such as video, transcript, or demographics, and source such as particular camera. Having all of this in the file name will make the data consistent and sortable. We also have to build a consistent file folder structure and locations for storing data, whether it’s dropbox or external hard drives or some other sharing platform for works in progress as well as ultimate archival.

The naming scheme goes beyond that, too, to the secondary data that we analyze, such as filenames in transcript analysis software, excel spreadsheets, and even presentations and writing. One more important type of data is the metadata, which is data about the data. For us, that could mean: a) descriptions of how and when the data is collected, part of which is captured in the filename but which can be expanded upon, b) descriptions of the data collection equipment, such as the type of camera (3301 or 1034 or other models), frame rate, and resolution, and c) descriptions of the larger events that may have been going on at the science center on any given day, such as Shark Day, Whale Watch Week, or Home School Days, if they were occurring.

Of course, with a number of people working on the project now, students rotating on and off the project, and visiting scholars joining, we have to make sure that this structure is communicated and most importantly, used! I have to admit I was guilty of this during my dissertation – having a plan at the beginning but not necessarily sticking to it. We’ll have to regularly re-visit the plan and make sure things are still working for everyone, but hopefully having a plan at the outset will prevent a lot of work down the road with a disorganized set of raw data, working data, meta data, and final products.

The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Informal science education research

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