Digital Archives and Visual Cognition

1Digital Archives and Visual Cognition

Digital Archives and Visual Cognition

Meghan Hines

LBSCI 730, Queens College

Spring 2015


The concept that ‘the simpler the form of a letter the simpler its reading” was an obsession of beginning constructivism. It became something like a dogma, and is still followed by “modernistic” typographers.

This notion has proved to be wrong, because in reading we do not read letters but words, words as a whole, as a ”word picture.” Ophthalmology has disclosed that the more the letters are differentiated from each other, the easier is the reading.

Without going into comparisons and the details, it should be realized that words consisting of only capital letters present the most difficult reading – because of their equal height, equalvolume, and, with most, their equal width. When comparing serif letters with sans-serif, the latter provide an uneasy reading. The fashionable preference for sans-serif in text shows neither historical nor practical competence.

Joseph Albers, Interaction of Color

If one limits strong, heavy, rich, and solid colors to the small areas of extremes, then expressive and beautiful colored area patterns occur….Large area background or base-colors do their work most quietly, allowing the smaller, bright areas to stand out most vividly, if the former are muted, grayish or neutral.

Eduard Imhof, Cartographic ReliefPresentation


Archives as we commonly understand them are a product of the

European Enlightenment, brought about by the rise in literacy and

the revolution in epistemology and empiricism culminating in the

French Revolution, and later fostered by the growth of state

bureaucracy and logical positivism.

As bureaucracy has grown throughout the centuries still

dominated by Enlightenment theory, documentation has increased

exponentially – the difference being that the bureaucracy of

government has been expanded to include that of business. While

merchant records are among the oldest known written records, the

exponential increase in corporate records marks a convergence

with the state-capital apparatus, a special phase in which

records accumulation is not additive but expands via orders of


magnitude, as has been the case historically: Sir Hilary

Jenksinon gives way to the problem of bulk, which gives way to

big data, and through all of this, new ways of knowing come into

being.

The present is a period of inflationary documentation – not

only of government and traditional business (which tends to

obscure the productive forces which constitute it), but that of

personal-corporate enterprise, wherein social media lays plain

the mode of production (user contributions) while only thinly

veiling the monetizing aspects. Facebook and Yelp! are prime

examples. This enterprise reflects not a new mode of production

but an intensified and extensified one, where all human acts can

be monetized and the distinction between work and leisure time

(to the extent there was one) becomes increasingly blurred.

Due to these changes in material conditions of capital,

archivists will be required to expand their repertoire,

particularly with regards to digital archives, which, if trends

persist, will become dominant in the years and decades to come.

The digital era is already completely transforming how people


consume and produce information and knowledge and archivists must

be able to respond to these developments.

One of the most important tasks of digital archives will not

be the simple aggregation and description of records, but the

understanding of the shifts in cognition that take place in the

digital realm. These then must be applied in consideration to the

audience and its socio-economic factors (race, gender, age,

disability, etc.), to provide not only access but the means of

access to targeted populations. By means of access it is meant that

instead of a one-sided production of content, that user

interaction and feedback will come to be integrated into the

process of access itself, not as exogenous factors but as

fundamental elements of the content creation process. That is,

the archives become a social media, but of a special sort. Before

getting to that stage, however, there must be an approach to

digital access incorporating visual cognition, and much work must

be done to ease discoverability through advances in software

design, development of best practices, and day-to-day archival


use of graphic design supported by pedagogical and neurological

research.

ARCHIVES: PRESENT AND FUTURE

As digital archives grow in number and content, fewer

physical archives will be necessary as records are either born

digitally or transferred to digital media, with the physical

container destroyed or put into storage. Rare books and other

elite archival objects will still require physical spaces at

least for the time being, but given improvements in technology,

remote-viewing might soon be able to completely replace in-person

visits. Work will be spread between disparate physical locales as

telecommuting continues its inexorable progress; in short time,

the archive will resemble more a cybernetic map than a modern

office.

Per the United States’ Bureau of Labor Statistics (2015),

“employment of archivists is projected to grow 17 percent from

2012 to 2022, faster than the average for all occupations.” The

BLS is quick to note however the small size of the profession and

thus the pitiful number of actual jobs this translates to (1,100


over 10 years). Factored with the number of graduates in library

science and related fields, this makes for a highly competitive

environment with preference given to those with high levels of

computer and communicative skills Specifically, the BLS states

that those with experience with electronic records are desirable

candidates, but electronic records – often code for traditional

records management – only hints at the paradigm shift

approaching, i.e., the shifting means not only of providing

access, but of records creation, description, etc. The Society

for American Archives (SAA) has on its website a 130-page manual

on digital skills for employment

(https://www.archivists.org/publications/proceedings/NewSkillsFor

ADigitalEra.pdf). If the SAA is that concerned, then it is

without a doubt necessary for aspiring archivists to have a

healthy grasp on information technologies. In a few years the

landscape is likely to change drastically, which means that those

with limited computer and information skills will be left behind.

It is recommended therefore for students and professionals alike

to embrace the digital now, and embrace it in full.


The growth in digital records reflected in the growth of

digital asset management, which according to the New York Times

(2008) employed about 20,000 people in 2008, which was then

predicted to experience three-fold increase in one decade. This

indicates that while traditional archival positions may be

difficult to acquire, related positions are relatively plentiful,

provided, again, one has the requisite computer skills. However,

the Times warned, “People with I.T. backgrounds tend to be wrong

for the job...They tend to focus on storage solutions.” Like many

in the libraries and archives field, many who work in Digital

Asset Management come to their positions from a variety of

academic and work backgrounds. Along with Records Management,

DAM provides an attractive alternative to traditional archival

jobs. Growth in these related fields will bring about changes

within the archival field, with each field adopting principles

and techniques from each other while attempting to reign in

control on the avalanche of digital material being produced. The

lines between public and private will become increasingly

blurred, with academic institutions adopting strategies from


business and advertising, although it is hoped that these would

be suitably tailored to archival standards.

Though various factors contribute to the evolving landscape

of archival work, it was noted in the 2001 Annual Meeting of the

SAA by Davis (2012) “it’s primarily technology that is bringing

this [paradigm shift] to the fore.” As Davis (2012, from SAA 2011

Annual Meeting) noted:

A recent survey indicates that virtual forms of interaction

between patrons and repository staff (including email,

website comment features, and interactive chat reference)

have increased dramatically in the past decade…Similarly

this same survey of 275 American and Canadian special

collections libraries found that only 7 percent of survey

respondents provided no Web-based access to their finding

aids. In addition to reference services and finding aid

delivery, exhibitions, digitized-collection materials, and

community outreach initiatives have all moved to the virtual

realm. Though it is difficult to confirm that the growth of

archives’ presence on the Web is solely responsible, in this


same period (2000–2009), use of manuscript and archival

collections increased as much as 88 percent.

This digital shift - nominally starting with the advent of

Web 2.0 - has led to a massive increase in potential archival

content; coupled with software and hardware advancements and

cheap storage costs, we can only expect content to continue to

expand, with new emphasis on born-digital records. This expansion

supports not only the existing population of academic and general

public researchers, but widens and deepens the needs of these

groups, with growth both in terms of absolute numbers of but also

as a percentage of the general population; the vast use of the

Google search engine and Wikipedia are ample proof of this

enormous growth. As archives make more content available

digitally, this will not only mirror the trend the expansion of

research but will actively shape that content and how and why we

make records accessible.

Manovich (2013) describes this condition as “software

epistemology,” a dynamic system similar to machine learning that

produces new ways of knowing:


…turning everything into data, and using algorithms to

analyze it changes what it means to know something. It

creates new strategies that together make up software

epistemology…. social media and other parts of the modern

technosocial universe introduce new ways of acquiring

knowledge, and in the process, redefine what knowledge is…

Furthering this concept, Manovich (2013) describes a part-

whole relationship roughly analogous to concepts found throughout

nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, linguistics,

psychology, computer and cognitive studies:

….another important type…is data fusion – using data from

different sources to create new knowledge that is not

explicitly contained in any of them. For example, using the

web sources, it is possibly to create a comprehensive

description of an individual by combining pieces of

information from their various social media profiles and

making deductions from them.

In a way, this description can be used to consider the act

of archiving itself, given the multifarious skills and


disciplines represented in the field which find their archival

apotheosis as a connected system, as a network. Manovich (2013),

elaborating on Kay and Goldberg’s theory of the metamedium is

instructive here as well:

… the property that is most important from the point of view

of media history is that the computer metamedium is

simultaneously a set of different media and a system for

generating new media tools and new types of media. In other

words, a computer can be used to create new tools for

working with the media types it already provides as well to

develop new not-yet-invented media.

The idea of technology supplanting human creativity is

difficult to process, but it is also disturbing to conceive of

human capacity in a static or linear fashion. For instance, it is

commonly held that academic researchers using an archive come

prepared, that they know precisely what it is they are looking

for and simply require an adequate guide for locating this

material. This belies that fact that many creative, genius acts

occur by what appears as happenstance, and can stem from a desire


to pursue knowledge about something ambiguously conceived of – an

intuition, perhaps - and that the knowledge formation thus

appears not as arboreal, but rhizomatic. Put simply, one should

not conceive of knowledge reception but rather knowledge

production occurring not in a top-down, linear mode, but

occurring at all phases and proceeding in all directions.

This characterization should not imply that knowledge and

information cannot and should not be structured, but rather

that this structure has to be conceived of according to

different models. As an interviewee noted in a SAA usability

study, the ambiguity concerning beginning and ending points…

in internet searches,” results in the sense of “how do you

know you’ve gotten all of it? . . . perhaps the archivist

has simply directed you toward one chunk and you’re missing

out on a lot of other things that go along with it. So

that’s kind of how I remember feeling . . . until I realized

that you always feel that way.

Perhaps, like the interviewee stated, this is an ever-

present sense during research, simply magnified by the extent of


the digital archive and the internet. However, via adequate

study, design and implementation of visual-cognitive theory in

the digital archive, this sense of aporia and lack of

authoritative trust can be reduced, or even transformed as the

researcher becomes less dependent on any one archivist and more

on a community of users mutually using sophisticated software.

Responding to and continuing to iteratively learn from these

processes is our task as archivists.

VISUAL COGNITION: THEORY AND FINDINGS

While we have sketched a rather abstract long-term process,

in the near-term these theories and trends amount to a need to

make web tools appealing without promoting negative cognitive or

physical effects, such as visual and cognitive distraction, being

overwhelmed by colors, graphics, and animations; illegible text

formats using inappropriate fonts, kerning and text

spatialization, etc. It is paramount to do so as archives face

continuous assault from repositories such as Google and

Wikipedia.


In trying to address the “how do you know you’ve gotten all

of it” morass that many researchers, academic or otherwise, often

find themselves in, Tufte (1990) clarifies: “it is not how much

empty space there is, but rather how it is used. It is not how

much information is there, but rather how effectively it is

arranged.” This removes some of the black-and-white thinking

pertaining to clutter or “unstructured” data and orderly or

“structured data” and allows us to instead think of the

opportunities for creative, interactive design.

Scene Vision is a specialty in the area of visual cognition

and is highly applicable to web context. Scene Vision: Making

Sense of What We See, edited by Kveraga and Bar (2014) is a

sophisticated yet approachable collection of writings by expert

scientists in the field. An especially relevant chapter is

Putting Scenes in Context, by Elissa M. Aminoff. In this ,

Aminoff explains why scene understanding is not reductive to a

single dimension (three-dimensionality, for instance), and that

elements high in associative strength (objects) are in fact

“extracted first and used to access long-term representations of


contexts and scene categorizations. These long-term

representations are then used to generate predictions and

expectations about the environment…” This means that the

background of a scene, or its layout, is secondary to the

recognition of objects within the scene, which then produced

associative memories which then signal what the scene is.

Although secondary, the scene understanding is critical to making

sense of the image, and cannot be approached as an afterthought.

In chapter five, “The Neurophysiology of Attention and

Object Recognition,” a saliency map, or a model that uses the

distribution of features such as color, brightness, and

orientation, to make an image of a single representation is

described by the results of a study,

…monkeys were required to make an eye movement to an oddball

stimulus (a red target in an array of green distracters or a

green target among red distractors). Cells in the lateral

intraparietal area initially responded indiscriminately to a

target and a distracter (i.e., whether the object was green

or red, or whether it was talk relevant or irrelevant), but


the response of cells shifted to signal whether or not the

oddball target was in or out of their respective fields.

Thus, neural activity in the lateral intraparietal area

might gradually develop to represent the visual priority of

the location occupied by an object in a scene.

Kveraga and Bar, 2014

One counter-intuitive example found in Liqiong (2010)

pertains to differences in affective responses to software and

how complexity can be desirable not only for purposes applicable

to advertising and the short-term attention often desired to make

sales, but to specific types of researchers, academic or

otherwise. In short, simple design, or rather, “order” is

desirable for the ideal researcher who comes well-prepared and

seeks to take no excursions. Complexity (un-order), by contrast,

is appealing to those who are seeking excitement. Between these

two types is a vast continuum: one aspect of research is the

element of surprise, of play, of discovery, that can only occur

if the activity being undertaken does not pertain so much to the

goal-directed behavior of the first type. Understanding design


affect is therefore important when considering your audience, and

depending on the variations within your audience, it may be

recommended to create two versions of your site, where upon

landing on the home page, the visitor can choose between more

“orderly” and more “complex” iterations. These two types of

visitors can be described as “telic” and “paratelic”

The telic…state is characterized as goal-oriented in which

the ultimate goal of any ongoing activity is perceived as

essential for the individual, and the activity itself is

peripheral. In the telic state, a high level of arousal is

experienced as unpleasant and associated with anxiety,

because it is perceived as interfering with the achievement

of the goal. However, a low level of arousal in this state

is experienced as pleasant and described as relaxation.

Therefore, individuals in the telic state are depicted as

serious-minded, future-oriented, and arousal avoidant,,,In

contrast to the anxiety avoiding telic state, the paratelic

state… is related to excitement-seeking. This state is

characterized as activity-orientation, where the goal of the


activity is not important compared to the ongoing activity…

In the paratelic state, a high level of arousal is

experienced as pleasant because it is associated with

excitement, whereas a low level of arousal is experienced as

unpleasant and described as boredom. Thus, individuals in a

paratelic state are characterized as playful, present-

oriented, and arousal-seeking.

Liqiong (2010)

As pertains to the cognitive rather than emotional effect,

order is inhibiting to effort, Liqiong (201) states:

As the extent of order grows, it structures diversity,

brings unity, coherence, and clarity to the environment, and

reduces efforts required to comprehend the environment. A

high level of order is hence arousal-reducing, as it reduces

uncertainty and calls for less energy allocation to the

stimulus.

It bears repeating that stimuli is worth researching and

integrating into software and website design, as the link between

neuronal firing rates “excitement” and long-term memory is well-


founded (e.g. Lisman & Grace (2005), The Hippocampal-VTA Loop:

Controlling the Entry of Information into Long-Term Memory).

Another emerging practice highly relevant to archivists is

Visual Analytics. This is described by Lemieu (2015) as an

“intelligence augmenting” technology relying on the deployment of

graphical rather than text-based images: “through encoding of

data into graphical images, visualizations can act as a

repository of data which allows individuals to offload cognition

to the perceptual system, using visuals as a form of virtual

memory.” This is seen to have “advantages over other modes of

communication and thought because humans have evolved visual and

spatial skills that include the ability to detect edges and

discontinuities, to recognize patterns, and to retrieve

information using visual cues” which can be then be turned into

graphics to “provide a rich visual description of data… observed

with ‘pre-attentive processing’, that is, they are perceived

prior to conscious attention, they are understandable at a glance

and much more rapidly than words.” Tufte (1990) expresses this

more poetically:


We thrive in information-thick worlds because of our

marvelous and everyday capacities to select, edit, single

out, structure, highlight, group, pair, merge, harmonize,

synthesize, focus, organize, condense …enumerate, glean,

synopsize, winnow the wheat from the chaff, and separate the

sheep from the goats. And a lot of data are processed:

recent [2006] evidence indicates that the optic nerve

connecting eye’s retina to brain operates at 10MB per

second, equivalent to an Ethernet.

For archival purposes, specifically with regard to EAD and

XML-based finding aids, these discoveries have, per Lemieu (2015)

“created new opportunities for the introduction of new

visualization tools that leverage archival descriptive metadata.”

One such attempt uses “visualizations to represent multiple

‘dimensions,’ (for example, relationships among persons,

committees, and so on) in online finding aids.,,[seeking to]

visualize archival information by applying Ted Nelson’s ZigZag™

(http://xanadu.com/zigzag/) structure to two existing EAD finding

aids.” Another approach extracts data and structural information


directly from source documents and attempts to “visually express

hierarchies, networks, processes, and timelines” using EAD.

Conceiving and practicing highly sophisticated and novel

modes of design is important, but more important (at least for

the short-term) is design sensitive to differences in culture,

gender, age, disability, and so forth. For instance:

Women tend to engage in a comprehensive and detailed

analysis of all available information, whereas men focus on

highly available cues and attempt to engage in the selective

processing of available information…In other words,

researchers have found that women consider as much

information as possible, whereas men selectively process

information relevant to their goals. Women are more visually

oriented and prefer more visually graphic images than men

do.

Sook-Hyun (2013)

According to Sook-Hyun, men are seen as outperforming women

on spatial tasks (a common stereotype) especially with regard to


attraction to vertical symmetrical websites, which they conclude

suggests that website layout is only be stimulating for men.

While this essentialist reasoning is problematic, there

nevertheless are real cognitive differences amongst genders

produced that are through societal relations, are these are

important factors when considering web access.

Another controversial consideration involves differences

between East Asian and Western cognitive styles. East Asians are

“holistic,” while Westerners are “analytic, per Boduroglu

(2009). This specifically refers to “scene processing, with

Westerners attending more to focal objects and East Asians

attending more to the background context.” For example, a

Westerner would pay more attention to the fish and the East Asian

to the total image of the coral, stones, and fauna in the fish

task. Furthermore:

Americans detect more changes in focal objects while the

Japanese detect more changes occurring in the backgrounds of

the scenes. Finally, studies monitoring eye movements

during scene encoding have demonstrated that Americans focus


on focal objects sooner and longer than East Asians whose

attention is oriented away from focal objects and toward

backgrounds.

Boduroglu

(2009)

The site http://muyueh.com/greenhoney/ compares the

description of color and in Chinese and English via text and

dynamic graphics, and asks if different cultures are capable of

seeing the same color if they lack a word for it. The researcher

broke with conventional modelling which indicated that English

contained a wider array and density of color names; however, this

was corrected to reflect that Chinese uses a base color with an

adjective to describe various shades – for example, apple green

and frog green. Once corrected, the spread evened out more, but

the colors most focused on by the respective languages were

different, with Chinese focusing on red, green, and blue; and

English on blue, green, and pink.

Related to pre-attentive processing and holistic cognition

is the concept of the Spatial Envelope as elaborated by Oliva


(2001): “perceptual dimensions (naturalness, openness, roughness,

expansion, ruggedness)” are used as the underlying scenic

structure. These are used to create a “multidimensional space in

which scenes sharing membership in semantic categories (e.g.,

streets, highways, coasts) are projected closed together.” This,

Oliva states, indicates that specific knowledge about shapes and

identity are not necessary – rather that the rest of the scene

directs knowledge towards a semantic category. This reliance on

the “shape of a scene” bears more than surface similarities with

the way in which languages which rely on ideograms such as

Chinese and Japanese are processed conceptually and how then in

turn condition the conceptions of the speaker/reader.

Age has a special impact on holistic visual cognition, s

Sekuler (2000) older persons are particularly sensitive to image

overload and multi-tasking, performing much poorer on these tasks

than younger counterparts (though multi-tasking, here described

as “peripheral-task performance” negatively affects all age-

groups). Sekuler concludes that the results of their study

indicate that the unified field and vision and ability to multi-


task linearly decrease over time between ages 20 and 60, as

opposed to occurring as steep drop-off in older years. Design

that minimizes tasks per page or page region (a region as a

visually and cognitively distinct area of a screen) will be

important with an aging American population.

RECOMMENDATIONS

At the institutional level, usability tests should be

performed regularly, at least once every other year. These vary

from informal interview processes to complicated and invasive web

analytics (for instance, there are ways to determine visual

interest using finger sweat). Most archives would suffice to use

the former method, but for those who wish to stay on the cutting

edge and remain close to budget, the development of web analytics

is preferable. Altman (2001) recommends the following when

conducting a usability test of any kind: 1) use known researchers

or others who are representative of your users; (2) have the

users perform real tasks with the site (interface play alone is

not sufficient) and (3) do not lead users. “The goal of the test


is to elicit comments from the users, and to see what they think

as they proceed in solving the test task.”

Prom (2012) notes that usability studies are not widely

available and mostly limited to large institutions, although

these are more prevalent in the United Kingdom . Further, this

article indicates that as of its printing, the “current state of

knowledge about archival users comes mainly from interacting with

users in a physical archive.” This is to be corrected with new

and improved usability studies for archives small and large, but

there are other methods available in the interim that can lead

the way towards enhanced user experience of digital archives.

Per Prom, “web analytics is a new method that archivists can

use to measure user actions, to understand some aspects of user

behavior, and to initiate a program to continuously improve

online services.” Web analytics also improve over basic

performance tools that archives more commonly employ, such as

user logs. Prom states:


Standard reporting mechanisms such as server logs produce

rudimentary, irrelevant or misleading data, so different

measures are needed. Web analytics can provide “accurate and

deep information” about online usage. For example, they

report which websites referred users to the site, how long

users stayed on particular pages, and how many pages they

viewed during a visit. Their reports exclude traffic

generated by nonhuman agents (such as Web crawlers), so only

actual use is included in the reports. Analytics software

can also help an archivist understand how a particular

resource type is being used. For example, the software can

measure the frequency with which a page is viewed after

people view the page’s parent record. Web analytics software

has another advantage: It provides a means to indirectly

observe some of the ways in which users interact with online

resources while they are seeking information relevant to an

actual research need. Most other methods of studying user

behavior require intervention, contact, or observation, each

of which inevitably affects user actions. For example, many

user studies ask people to complete a canned search or to


“act normal,” even though they are being observed or even

videotaped. Of course, Web analytics cannot substitute for

consulting users or conducting formal usability studies.

Used in conjunction with other, more traditional methods of

studying user behavior, however, it can force us to ask new

questions about users and their information seeking

behaviors.

Archives can purchase web analytics software or use free or

low-cost services through Google or browse free software at

piwik.org. There are also many more costly versions, for us by

larger and more established archives. If the archive is part of a

large institution such as a university the software can be

purchased for cross-departmental use.

Davis (2012) notes the lack of literature on archival

usability (or in their words, accessibility, which I am

conflating). Davis encourages archivists to look afield for

contemporary and relevant sources: though unnamed, these fields

and subjects would include information science, computer science,

cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human-computer


interaction, visual cognition, graphic design, software design,

and humanities such as history, anthropology, and fine art, to

name a few. Davis encourages archives to consult the 1999

version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and

the 2008 WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines

(http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/ ) which include “historical

development, rationales, and ongoing changes to and critiques of

this preeminent standard.”

On the individual level, although there are volumes of data

on visual cognition being produced every year, familiarity with

the subject derived from informal study is completely within the

realm of possibility. One could subscribe to a journal or

periodical, for instance, or organize and present panels on the

subject at archival conferences. Less rigorous activities could

include subscribing to or creating listservs (perhaps as a

corollary to the Visual Materials listserv through the SAA).

Pratt Institute’s SILS offers courses pertaining to Cultural

Informatics, or more colloquially, human computer interaction,

(https://www.pratt.edu/academics/information-and-library-


sciences/program-concentrations/cultural-informatics/) with

courses on digital curation, cultural heritage access and

preservation, museum education, and user studies. Pratt also

offers a concentration in User Experience

https://www.pratt.edu/academics/information-and-library-

sciences/areas-of-study/user-experience/) which includes

coursework in human information behavior, information science and

information visualization. Many Library and Information Science

departments now included at least introductory coursework in the

area of human computer interaction, and students should appeal to

add additional relevant courses, especially those related to

cognitive neuroscience, cognitive linguistics, new media, digital

media pedagogy and graphic design. Ideally, this would

eventually lead to the creation of a program concentration or

certificate program in the subject.

Beyond individual and institutional endeavors, it is highly

recommended that the SAA convene a committee to develop a manual

or guide for the majority of archives which have limited means.

This committee could be comprised of archival and information


specialists, artists, graphic designers, software developers, and

visual cognitions, many of whom could be sourced from archival

and library programs and from respective fields (since archival

workers and MLIS programs draw from diverse backgrounds). The

committee would establish best practices, recommend software,

conduct and analyze studies, include a review of literature, and

perhaps over the course of multiple years create their own

software to be licensed at discounted rates for member

institutions. While there is doubtlessly much of this work being

done through ad-hoc organizations and through open-source

software, SAA has the resources to produce high-quality, cross-

platform, customizable software designed by experts in archival

science, visual cognition, and graphic and software design that

would require only periodic updating. Customer support for this

product would provide job opportunities for students and novices

in the field. Reports and studies would be conducted periodically

to provide opportunities for software improvement and

customization, as well as general insight into researcher needs

and habits. As it advanced, the software could undergo machine

learning and progress to a level where immediate, high-result


customizations could be implemented (and de-implemented), with

that information being fed back into the program network.

There are many opportunities for archives and archivists to

develop their knowledge regarding visual cognition to enhance

access, discoverability, and foster learning. As archives are

more and more referred to as an “evolving” field, taking these

tasks into account will do well to serve researchers and

archivists alike; archivists can expand their role significantly

if they are able to make research more appealing, efficient, and

powerful.


REFERENCES

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Digital Archives and Visual Cognition

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