Etching by Da Vinci? Representing legend, culture, and language
- A photo I took in Piazza della Signoria of an etching, reportedly a self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci that he etched behind his back on a dare onto the side of the Palazzo Vecchio.
Is this etching a self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci created hundreds of years ago? That’s what I was told by a Californian friend who had “gone native” in Florence. Another matter: is this, in fact, a commonly believed and shared legend, and what other variations are there on it?
I shared the story with some fellow visitors in Florence on a lunch-time return to the piazza. Ed Chi tried to verify the rumor using a Web search, but with no success. At least in English, there didn’t seem to be much on this in the Web. (See my photo and comments on Flickr.)
I posted the photo on Flickr. I asked questions on LinkedIn and Yahoo! Answers, with no success. I also asked for help from workers on Mechanical Turk. Here’s part of how I asked for help:
There is a portrait etched in stone on the wall of Palazzo Vecchio in Piazza della Signoria in Florence (Firenza), Italy. It is close behind the copy of the David there. I have heard that there is a legend that this is a self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci. I am looking for any information about this legend, alternate versions of the legend, or information about the real source of the portrait.
What results have been offered seem to suggest that this legend exists — though perhaps it is “actually” (at least as captured online, since perhaps the Leonardo theorists aren’t as active digital content creators) about Michelangelo:
- Palazzo Vecchio in Italian Wikipedia
- Florentine Legends: Fact or Fiction (in Italian)
- Curiosities in Florence
The best way of finding out seemed to actually be my Flickr photo itself, since that’s where Daniel Witting provided the first two links above — however, this was a few months after the photo was first posted to Flickr. Turkers provided a couple useful links also (“Curiosities” above) on a shorter schedule and with a higher price. (I should have also tried uClue — where many former Google Answers researchers now work. This was recommended by Max Harper, who has studied Q&A sites in detail.)
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Question and answer services along the lines of Yahoo! Answers rose to global (and U.S.) significance only after success in Korea, where Naver Knowledge iN pioneered the use of an online community to power a Q&A site. A major motivation Korea was the limited amount of Korean content online. With Naver’s offering, Korea’s Internet saavy, English population made information newly available in Korean (and did plenty of other interesting work).
This is as significant a motivation for Q&A sites by English-speaking folks in the U.S., but the present case is an exception.
Some of the questions that made this case interesting to me:
- What culturally-shared beliefs get manifest online? During this whole process, I and others wondered whether perhaps this local legend was only shared orally. It seems that it is represented online after all — at least the Michelangelo variant, but it could have been otherwise.
- How does the pair of languages a task requires knowledge of determine the processes, structres, and communities that are optimal for completing the task? For example, it seems quite important whether the target or source language has many more speakers than the other. (One could think about this simplistically in terms of conditional probabilities of skills with language A given skill with language B and vice verse.)
Motivations for tagging: organization and communication motives on Facebook
Increasing valuable annotation behaviors was a practical end of a good deal of work at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. ZoneTag is a mobile application and service that suggests tags when users choose to upload a photo (to Flickr) based on their past tags, the relevant tags of others, and events and places nearby. Through social influence and removing barriers, these suggestions influence users to expand and consistently use their tagging vocabulary (Ahern et al. 2006).
Context-aware suggestion techniques such as those used in ZoneTag can increase tagging, but what about users’ motivations for considering tagging in the first place? And how can these motivations for annotation be considered in designing services that involve annotation? In this post, I consider existing work on motivations for tagging, and I use tagging on Facebook as an example of how multiple motivations can combine to increase desired annotation behaviors.
Using photo-elicitation interviews with ZoneTag users who tag, Ames & Naaman (2007) present a two factor taxonomy of motivations for tagging. First, they categorize tagging motivations by function: is the motivating function of the tagging organizational or communicative? Organizational functions include supporting search, presenting photos by event, etc., while communicative functions include when tags provide information about the photos, their content, or are otherwise part of a communication (e.g., telling a joke). Second, they categorize tagging motivations by intended audience (or sociality): are the tags intended for my future self, people known to me (friends, family, coworkers, online contacts), or the general public?
On Flickr the function dimension generally maps onto the distinction between functionality that enables and is prior to arriving at the given photo or photos (organization) and functionality applicable once one is viewing a photo (communication). For example, I can find a photo (by me or someone else) by searching for a person’s name, and then use other tags applied to that photo to jog my memory of what event the photo was taken at.
Some Flickr users subscribe to RSS feeds for public photos tagged with their name, making for a communication function of tagging — particularly tagging of people in media — that is prior to “arriving” at a specific media object. These are generally techie power users, but this can matter for others. Some less techie participants in our studies reported noticing that their friends did this — so they became aware of tagging those friends’ names as a communicative act that would result in the friends finding the tagged photos.
This kind of function of tagging people is executed more generally — and for more than just techie power users — by Facebook. In tagging of photos, videos, and blog posts, tagging a person notifies them they have been tagged, and can add that they have been tagged to their friends’ News Feeds. This function has received a lot of attention from a privacy perspective (and it should). But I think it hints at the promise of making annotation behavior fulfill more of these functions simultaneously. When specifying content can also be used to specify recipients, annotation becomes an important trigger for communication.
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See some interesting comments (from Twitter) about tagging on Facebook:
- noticing people tagging to gain eyeballs
- exhorting others not to tag bad photos (and thanks)
- collapsing time by tagging photos from long ago
- tagging by parents
(Also see Facebook’s growing use and testing of autotagging [1, 2].)
References
Ames, M., & Naaman, M. (2007). Why we tag: motivations for annotation in mobile and online media. In Proceedings of CHI 2007 (pp. 971-980). San Jose, California, USA: ACM.
Ahern, S., Davis, M., Eckles, D., King, S., Naaman, M., Nair, R., et al. (2006). Zonetag: Designing context-aware mobile media capture to increase participation. Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing: New Social Practices and Implications for Technology Workshop. In Adjunct Proc. Ubicomp 2006.
Using a Wizard of Oz technique in mobile service design: probing with realistic motivations
As I’ve blogged before, I spoke at the Texting 4 Health conference on the topic of research methods for mobile messaging. One method I covered was an interesting use of Wizard of Oz techniques for designing mobile services. I’ve since started getting some of this material in writing for the Texting 4 Health book. Here is a taste of that material, minus the health-specific focus and examples.
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Just like the famous Wizard of Oz, one can simulate something impressive with a just a humble person behind the curtain — and use this simulation to inform design decisions. When using a Wizard of Oz technique to study a prototype, a human “wizard” carries out functions that, in a deployed application or service, would be handled by a computer. This can allow evaluating a design without fully building what can be expensive back-end parts of the system (Kelley 1984). The technique is often used in recognition-based interfaces, but it also has traditional applications to identifying usability problems and carrying out experiments in which the interaction is systematically manipulated.
Wizard of Oz techniques are well suited to prototyping mobile services, especially those using mobile messaging (SMS, MMS, voice messaging). When participants send a request, a wizard reads or listens to it and chooses the appropriate response, or just creates it on-the-fly. Since all user actions in mobile messaging are discrete messages and (depending on the application) the user can often tolerate a short delay, a few part-time wizards, such as you and a colleague, can manage a short field trial. As you’ll see, this can be used for purposes beyond many traditional uses of a Wizard of Oz.
Probing photo consumption needs with realistic motivations
One use for this technique in designing a mobile messaging service is a bit like a diary study. In designing an online and mobile photography service, we wanted to better understand what photos people wanted to view and what prompted these desires.1 Instead of just making diary entries, participants actually made voice requests to the system for photos – and received a mobile message with photos fitting the request in return. We didn’t need to first build a robust system that could do this; a few of us served as wizards, listening to the request, doing a couple manual searches, and choosing which photos to return on demand. Though this can be done with a normal voice call, we used a mobile client application that also recorded contextual information not available via a normal voice call (e.g. location), so that participants could make context-aware requests as they saw fit (e.g. “I want too see photos of this park”)
In this case, we didn’t plan to (specifically) create a voice-based photo search system; instead, like a diary study, this technique served as a probe to understand what we should build. As a probe it provided realistic motivations for submitting requests, as the request would actually be fulfilled. This design research, in additional to other interviews and a usability study, informed our creation of Zurfer, a mobile application that supports exploring and conversing around personalized, location-aware channels of photos.
It is great if the Wizard of Oz prototype is quite similar to what you later build, but it can yield valuable insights even if not. Sometimes it is precisely these insights that can lead you to substantially change your design.
This study design can apply in designing many mobile services. As in our photos study, participants can be interviewed about the trigger for the requests (why did they want that media or information) and how satisfied they were with the (human-created) responses.2
- This study was designed and executed at Yahoo! Research Berkeley by Shane Ahern, Nathan Good, Simon King, Mor Naaman, Rahul Nair, and myself. [↩]
- Participants were informed that their requests would be seen by our research staff. Anonymization and strict limits of who the wizards are is necessary to protect participants’ privacy. Even if participants are not informed that a wizard is creating the responses until they are debriefed after the experiment, participants can nonetheless be notified that their responses are being reviewed by the research team. [↩]