Joseph Corr

Updated Thesis Brief 5/1/6

There is a substantial need for a personally maintained, open-source, media management system for artists.  This thesis will explore the zeitgeist of the online gallery as explained by both traditional museums, galleries and academics, and the digital gallery, as explained by interactive designers, bloggers and scholars.  My initial concept was to attempt to recreate the phsycial gallery experience online, by learning how gallery owners and curators structure their exhibitions, and tapping into the decision making process that goes on, and adapting it to the digital realm.  This recreation relies on a sophisticated understanding of relational models of data, and a custom software application that takes into consideration the needs of this project: chiefly that it be free, fully customizable, and extentable to unseen applications.  The operation of this management system will be targeted towards the working or student artist.  This is a perpendicular change to my original concept, where I was mimicking the process of the curator and their needs, whereas this iteration focuses more on the art and the artists, and the framework of the project serves as an intelligent curator.

The commercial gallery’s main focus is to bring bodies into their location and sell them artwork based upon their exhibition’s organization and their marketing and promotion of their artists.  Traditional museums raision d’etre is the attraction of visitors to its halls and relative exclusivity of their collection.  Neither of these scenarios lend themselves to the support of a recreation of the gallery experience.  But the lack of interest from these two groups clearly illuminates the latent threat of a comprehensive online gallery experience, and the disintermediating power of the internet in the hands of an individual artist or movement of artists.  Rather than try and force a system on an unwilling client, I will create a comprehensive system for a needing (to succumb to the ‘broke artist’ stereotype) and deserving (in that the desire for the artist is to share their vision with the world) patron.

From Jakob Nielsen, the god of usability.

In our new eyetracking study, we recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of Web pages. We found that users’ main reading behavior was fairly consistent across many different sites and tasks. This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components:

• Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.
• Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.
• Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F’s stem.

LINK - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

LINK - http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/related_tag_browser/app/

I presented this in class, it’s a circular way of looking at Flickr.

OK. I have an updated Thesis Outline Here

The major changes are the condensing of the surveys, and rework of the development.