We're delighted at BHO to be playing a part in this new AHRC-funded project, led by the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) at King's College London. Our involvement is the digitisation for BHO of 29 volumes of the Calendars of Inquisitions Post Mortem, the single most important source for the study of landed society in later medieval
England. Those volumes will be available along the two early volumes for Henry III and Edward I that are already live. The forthcoming volumes cover the periods 1236-1447 and 1485-1509.
In addition to the volumes being accessible through BHO, the team at King's, working with colleagues at the University of Winchester, will create an additional database of the material for 1399-1447, allowing map-based and other statistical analyses of the data. Further details are available from the DDH site.
Tuesday, 28 February 2012
Monday, 27 February 2012
London Sheriffs' Court Roll
An edition of the court roll for 1320 is now live. Edited by Dr Matthew F. Stevens, it gives a complete edition and index of London's only surviving such roll for the medieval period, for July-Sept 1320. It was produced as part of the Centre for Metropolitan History ESRC-funded project 'London women and the economy before and after the black death' (2009-10). More information on the project is available on the project site; see also an introduction to the court roll itself.
Friday, 9 December 2011
Citations, week 50 2011
http://postalheritage.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/thurloe-and-the-secret-room/
The British Postal Museum & Archive ()
John Thurloe, whose state papers are available on BHO, was the first postmaster general and is reported to have opened and read all of the post every night.
http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/content/71/1/147.short
Hist Workshop J (2011) 71 ()
Many of BHO's London resources provide background for this article, which points to the significance of marriage as a means of acquiring Company membership for both women and men.
http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/content/58/2/283.short
Notes and Queries (2011) 58 ()
The author draws extensively on various BHO sources to piece together the identity of Ben Jonson's 'Love Lady'.
http://auldfromreekie.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/the-thrift/
The Auld from Reekie ()
A dilapidated and remote cottage on the Willey Estate in Shropshire was the centre of family life for this blogger.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys ()
The adjournment of Parliament (from the Journal of the House of Lords) goes unnoticed as Samuel Pepys gives an intimate view of the crisis in his marriage.
Friday, 30 September 2011
Lessons learned
Integrating usability into your work patterns means being able to demonstrate that you are in touch with the full range of users in a non-jargonistic way that excludes no-one. If you want to bootstrap usability, you will find that it has to influence and inform every single step of the development process and the relationship the project has with the wider organisational/business context in which it exists.
The biggest cultural shift is to make the usability analysis usable, i.e. to make the projects outputs extensible, transparent and traceable. The project will now be able to demonstrate an existing framework of usability into which any new development can be placed, discussed and tracked. Informal relationships with key users can now become formalised, events such as workshops can be opened up appealing to different audiences. Perhaps these workshops could also be taken out 'on the road' to visit institutions which development teams would not ordinarily get the chance to go to.
One potential dividend would be to build up experiences on the development of generic pieces of functionality, e.g. a registration form, a search form. New projects could then build these items of the back of hundreds (thousands?) of hours of research and development into these functions within the HE sector - an enviable knowledge base of good practice into which their own process could be recorded.
Usability practice has been integrated into our approach with no consultancy input - whilst there may be a need to create resources to define what constitutes the usability toolkit, this is liable to change over even a short period of time. Therefore, for usability to self-propagate, development teams across the HE sector need ways of communicating and discussing these approaches through worked examples. From a personal standpoint, there's no shortage of advice on the matter - what would be more useful if how other HE teams, facing the same institutional pressures, have actually run projects.
The funding for this project has generated a large amount of raw data on usage patterns which could inform other projects (e.g. library catalogues) at their outset. The opportunity is there to for this to be a two-way process - to give results back to the community upon project closure and so build up a corpus of material which could potentially be used in a longitudinal study of systems support in HE.
The usability process seeks to make clear specific obstacles and impediments which your users face; it would be ironic if the approach taken to more closely integrate usability practice into HE systems development relied on generalised case studies and theory.
The biggest cultural shift is to make the usability analysis usable, i.e. to make the projects outputs extensible, transparent and traceable. The project will now be able to demonstrate an existing framework of usability into which any new development can be placed, discussed and tracked. Informal relationships with key users can now become formalised, events such as workshops can be opened up appealing to different audiences. Perhaps these workshops could also be taken out 'on the road' to visit institutions which development teams would not ordinarily get the chance to go to.
One potential dividend would be to build up experiences on the development of generic pieces of functionality, e.g. a registration form, a search form. New projects could then build these items of the back of hundreds (thousands?) of hours of research and development into these functions within the HE sector - an enviable knowledge base of good practice into which their own process could be recorded.
Usability practice has been integrated into our approach with no consultancy input - whilst there may be a need to create resources to define what constitutes the usability toolkit, this is liable to change over even a short period of time. Therefore, for usability to self-propagate, development teams across the HE sector need ways of communicating and discussing these approaches through worked examples. From a personal standpoint, there's no shortage of advice on the matter - what would be more useful if how other HE teams, facing the same institutional pressures, have actually run projects.
The funding for this project has generated a large amount of raw data on usage patterns which could inform other projects (e.g. library catalogues) at their outset. The opportunity is there to for this to be a two-way process - to give results back to the community upon project closure and so build up a corpus of material which could potentially be used in a longitudinal study of systems support in HE.
The usability process seeks to make clear specific obstacles and impediments which your users face; it would be ironic if the approach taken to more closely integrate usability practice into HE systems development relied on generalised case studies and theory.
How successful have we been?
Our project plan lays down two kinds of success metric: quantitative and qualitative. However, a secondary aim is looking at identifying a method whereby these practices could be built into existing projects without much additional cost and enhance the quality of the next generation of software being built in UK HE. This is essential for niche areas of scholarship for which supporting software needs a high degree of innovation and no other product currently meets the needs of researchers.
SUS before development
SUS after modification
In addition, it is extensible; given the resources, each issue could be revisited, redeveloped and retested; new issues in other areas could be added to the issue list document. By publishing the information openly using a blog platform, the entire process is opened up for discussion and analysis.
It lends itself to networking/discussion and gives development teams the opportunity to discuss approaches to improving software beyond institutional technical environments.
Quantitative ('what people do')
Each identified issue have been separately reported; a digest appears below.- Issue 1: met
- Issue 2: partially met
- Issue 3: met
- Issue 4: partially met
- Issue 5: partially met
- Issue 6: no change
- Issue 7: unmet
- Issue 8: no change
- Issue 9: met
Qualitative ('what people say')
It was not possible to schedule re-interviews following the modifications being made live but here are the differences in the results from the System Usability Scale (SUS), a link to which appears on every page in BHO.SUS before development
- Best imaginable: 40
- Excellent: 33
- Good: 28
- OK: 22
- Poor: 16
- Awful: 14
- Worst imaginable: 14
SUS after modification
- Excellent: 40
- Good: 28
- Poor: 21
Approach
We have successfully implemented a usability-centric approach, without consultant input, which covers the needs of a temporary project revolving around one set of software updates as well as providing the means for an ongoing inclusive dialogue across all functional departments (technical, editorial, managerial, marketing etc). There have been virtually no direct costs; the process has been devised, developed, implemented and reported on by existing staff, with the intention of making the results and as much of the raw data available for re-use by the HE community.In addition, it is extensible; given the resources, each issue could be revisited, redeveloped and retested; new issues in other areas could be added to the issue list document. By publishing the information openly using a blog platform, the entire process is opened up for discussion and analysis.
It lends itself to networking/discussion and gives development teams the opportunity to discuss approaches to improving software beyond institutional technical environments.
Bootstrapping usability
As more and more content was added to British History Online (BHO), the listings pages and search results became longer and users were confronted by growing amounts of information which they would need to sift through to help them decide on which sources were going to be relevant to their research.
To prevent users becoming overwhelmed by the volume of information (thus impairing their ability to use the site for research), we undertook a usability project as part of the JISC 01/11B funding round. Our intention was to modify our way of working, building in usability practices, to find a self-sustaining way by which usability could be built into our working pattern and persist after the funding round had ended, i.e. bootstrapping.
Many project teams will be wondering how to employ usability without a budget - and that's the model we followed. Our only direct cost, a rolling subscription with VerifyApp.com, was USD10 per month but enabled the crucial quantitative aspect to our investigation.
Our plan envisioned us researching qualitative and quantitative feedback, altering the BHO interface according to recommendations, and then re-testing both sets afterwards to give a before and after style report. It wasn't all possible (we weren't able to schedule interviews after the development) but most of it is in place and we reported the results through this blog.
Here is an outline of the work:
To prevent users becoming overwhelmed by the volume of information (thus impairing their ability to use the site for research), we undertook a usability project as part of the JISC 01/11B funding round. Our intention was to modify our way of working, building in usability practices, to find a self-sustaining way by which usability could be built into our working pattern and persist after the funding round had ended, i.e. bootstrapping.
Many project teams will be wondering how to employ usability without a budget - and that's the model we followed. Our only direct cost, a rolling subscription with VerifyApp.com, was USD10 per month but enabled the crucial quantitative aspect to our investigation.
Our plan envisioned us researching qualitative and quantitative feedback, altering the BHO interface according to recommendations, and then re-testing both sets afterwards to give a before and after style report. It wasn't all possible (we weren't able to schedule interviews after the development) but most of it is in place and we reported the results through this blog.
Here is an outline of the work:
- interviews with historians
- focus group with the Survey of London at English Heritage
- benchmarking of System Usability Scale (SUS) before developments
- production of the issue list
- Click testing for each issue
- Development and deployment of new and modified functions on BHO
- Click testing for each issue using new modified interfaces
- Review of SUS results after modified interface went live
- Publishing the findings
BHO Issue 9: 'Users have no way of re-ordering a list'
Page
Listings and sourceHeuristic
SubjectiveDescription
Listings pages are sequenced by an editorial weighting: if a user remembers a source by time period, or by name, they have no way of re-ordering the list. Although source pages are arranged alphabetically, they may be structured by time period but authored in a non-linear sequence; alternatively, later volumes may be more comprehensive than earlier ones.Impact severity
HighRecommend
Add in-page options to change the sort order. Configure some sources to be sequenced differently by default.Examples
The Survey of London is being added to but newer volumes currently appear at the bottom of the listings, well below the fold. |
| New volumes appear right at the end (large descriptions also don't help scrolling) |
Quantitative measure
[Use the Lords Journals series]: if you wanted to see the most recent volumes first, click where you expect to be able to re-order this list
Actual question
Please click on where you'd expect to re-order this list to see the most recent volumes FIRST
Initial click test result ('before')
July 2011, 200 responses. |
| 'Before' |
Development change
Added toggling pair of links, Sort A-Z and Sort Z-A, right-aligned beneath search text box (Survey of London on British History Online). |
| Modified interface |
Follow-up click test result ('after')
September 2011, 154 responses.
 |
| 'After' |
Reflection
Clear grouping on correct sort function but still a few looking for this feature on the left hand side. In hindsight, that is where the search sort functions were located (see earlier Issue 3) and it compounds the recurring theme that the site needs a clearly designed and consistent layout for a control panel, to be used wherever appropriate.
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