Interestingly, this is the most difficult section for me to describe because, overall, the learning experience at the Information School has completely changed the way I view information and how people interact with it. The experience that most significantly challenged and stimulated me intellectually was a class that I thought I knew everything about: LIS 570, Research Methods, taught by Prof. Ricardo Gomez.
LIS 570: Research Methods
Before coming to the Information School, I completed a masters degree in Irish History at Trinity College Dublin, and during the entire degree I took various research methods classes. I assumed that I would not learn very much from LIS 570 due to my previous research experience and training.
From the first class section of LIS 570, I realized that this would be a far different experience from every other class I have taken at the iSchool. Prof. Gomez handed each of us a kaleidoscope, and explained that one of the goals of this class was to teach us about how research is affected by the way in which we view the world. The kaleidoscope's fractured and various images represented the multiple ways of interpreting and analyzing the world through research.
Getty Images
I knew that many of the people in the class were interested in topics relating to libraries, and I assumed that I would resign myself to working on a research project on libraries by default. Prof. Gomez had spoken with an MLIS alumnus, Mary Forster, at Getty Images who had a number of research projects that would be of possible interest to our class. We were able to design a research study in which we designed a contextual inquiry test for Getty Images to potentially use to study image searching by image professionals. In an HCI design class I took the previous quarter, I was introduced to the observational method of contextual inquiry, and the idea that designing and implementing usable systems should be grounded in observation of users in the context of their normal environment and work.
Challenges and Achievments
Early on we were met with some of the challenges endemic to conducting research, such as being unable to find enough study participants. This effectively rendered any findings of our contextual inquiries invalid, and based on my previous research methods training, I would have considered the entire project a waste of time as a result. However, Prof. Gomez and Mary Forster spoke to us about how the goal of this project was to become aware of our research design choices and the process more than the product.
We still wanted to ensure that Getty Images could reap some benefit from our research project, and decided to use our study as a pilot test for how one might conduct a contextual inquiry with image professionals. I thought that given my interest in information architecture, the need to demonstrate web tools observed in our research, and the needs of our major stakeholder, Mary Forster--instead of writing a 20-page report, it would be better to create a website. The tone of the website is intended to be academic in quality, but accessible and practical in design and content. This tied into another revelation gained from Prof. Gomez, that the best research is the research that actually gets used.
The website is representative of one of the major themes I learned at the iSchool: that technology can be utilized as a tool for providing access to information and inviting collaboration on it. I chose to use a Wordpress site, here, and invited the class and professor to comment on it. In stark comparison to my research methods class in Ireland, in which I was told specific ways to take notes and write papers, Prof. Gomez showed us that there is no one right way to conduct research. In Ireland I had to be deferential to older, famous historians, and here, I was taught that my perception of reality was not any better or worse than anyone else's, but it was inherently valuable for being unique and personal to me.
