ARCHIVES 2015

This poster aims to report on the early stages of a research project to document and analyze how humanities and social sciences scholars perceive the quality of analog moving image works and their digitized surrogates. The study’s hypothesis is that user perceptions of image quality may impact researchers’ ability to incorporate moving images as research data in their work.

Potential user communities that will be studied in this research include psychologists, cinema studies scholars, and historians, all of which have been identified as communities that frequently use legacy moving image materials in their research for purposes of documenting and analyzing phenomena. Typical examples of moving image uses might include psychologists looking at babies’ facial expressions to determine reactions to various stimuli, cinema studies experts looking at uses of color in a particular director’s feature films, or historians examining details in news footage such as clothing, automobiles, shop and street signs, and various interactions and activities in which those depicted are engaged. While it is a given that poor image quality may negatively impact the ability of users to gather and analyze data about the phenomena they are studying, few studies have actually examined user definitions of image quality and how perceptions of image quality may affect research activities.

The poster will summarize the research design for the larger study and also report on plans for a pilot study on researchers’ perceptions of image quality while using moving image materials from the Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron.

About the Author:

Karen F. Gracy is an associate professor in Library and Information Science at Kent State University. She possesses an MLIS and PhD in Library and Information Science from the University of California, Los Angeles and an MA in critical studies of Film and Television from UCLA. Recent publications have appeared in JASIST, Archival Science, American Archivist, Journal of Library Metadata, and Information and Culture. Dr. Gracy's scholarly interests are found within the domain of cultural heritage stewardship, which encompasses a broad range of activities such as preservation and conservation processes and practices, digital curation activities that consider the roles of heritage professionals and users in the lifecycle of objects and records, as well as knowledge representation activities such as definitions of knowledge domains, development of standards for description, and application of new technologies to improve access to cultural heritage objects. She teaches in the areas of preservation and archiving, with a focus on moving image archives and digital preservation issues.