Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  The Use of Visual Artifacts in the User-Informed Development of an Educational Digital Library Collection (21 Sep 2004) Significant work was put into representing the scope of the DWEL collection in terms of a number of themed sub-topic concept maps. These maps would help guide the working groups through many of the decisions that they would have to make, when searching for and then reviewing resources suitable for inclusion in the DWEL collection. Gradually, each sub-topic was represented by a concept map that contained all the subjects thought to be of relevance to that subtopic; a total of nine of sub-topic concept maps were thus generated, a full set of which is provided below. Note that the subject matter of most of these concept maps was derived in turn from the overall concept map of the DWEL project described above (see Figures 2 and 3). Each of the concept maps was distributed to the whole of the project, and could be referred to by the working groups when they were collecting resources to satisfy a particular campaign theme. As graphic representations of clusters of sub-topics and sub-sub-topics, they provided an easy way visually to assess whether a particular educational resource satisfied the scope of a particular sub-topic of the DWEL collection. As can be seen from Figure 4, the form of these maps varied, but in general they all represented attempts to parse a particular subject domain related to water into finer and finer categories, until the granularity of the bottom-level categories was focused enough to inform the collection and review of educational resources. For instance, in the 'atmosphere' concept map (top row, left), 'atmosphere' is parsed into 'human activities,' 'hazards,' 'causes of precipitation,' 'physics,' 'chemistry,' 'water cycle,' and 'forms of water'; and each of these sub-topics is then parsed again, with for instance 'causes of precipitation' being parsed into 'coalescence,' 'supercooling,' and 'cloud seeding.' Article URL: http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i03/Khoo/ Read 67 more articles from Journal of Digital Information sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Unmasking the Avatar: The Demographics of MMO Player Motivations, In-Game Preferences, and Attrition     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy