The meeting began at 14:00 and lasted approximately 40 minutes.
The Aims of My Research
My thesis should be categorized as one that is informing design. We know what the term social navigation is - it’s (more or less clearly) defined. What we know little about are how to use such navigational paradigms in the real world. There are many examples of web sites/applications where social navigation are blossoming but it’s creators does not use the term. Could it be that such navigational designs are grown organically and implicitly as a result of the creators’ focus on sociality?
My research should answer how social navigation can be (and is) leveraged in our modern web age in real projects. Social navigation is a central part of the web today but it’s now mostly referred to with the broader term Web 2.0.
One part of this work should be to define or redefine several concepts related to social navigation and thereby try to create a clear taxonomy of different types of social navigation.
Feedback on Delivery
My supervisor was confused by my usage of two tables to convey my content inventory of Flickr. Even though both tables have an id column for cross referencing it is hard to keep track of these as the columns in table two refer to content on the previous page (link name and location). Use of URL is probably not needed as it’s the least useful of my current columns and it takes up a great deal of visual space.
He was impressed with the level of detail I had recorded, but noted that I’d have to keep in mind that this process should be repeated on several other sites and this would leave me with a great deal of work.
We discussed that I had noticed several flaws of Flickr’s labeling when collecting data. Irregularities like this are not relevant for my research but it could be wise to note such things and that information architects probably would study this issue further. I could easily choose which of the titles (title tag in the head or h1 tag in the body) to use depending of which were most descriptive. I could even introduce my own title or adaptation of titles (in apostrophes) where the available titles were severely lacking in describing the site’s content (apparent in cluster pages for example).
The use of variables in my inventory was sound and well understood. I could however include examples of what the variables could convey in my tabular listing of them (like Cannon for $camera).
The inventory and subsequent analysis should contain screen shots of the most striking and interesting features.
Graphical representations (I had navigational maps based Beck’s maps of the London tube system in mind) could very well be included in the content analysis phase. These should not be substitutes of textual description and analysis but rather add to it.
Privacy
Privacy was included as one of the topics in my thesis proposal. We discussed whether I should focus on this issue. We concluded that I should ignore this issue in the beginning and maybe focus on it later on if time permits since it’s a topic of high interest to my supervisor.
Further Work
We decided on a fortnightly schedule for my supervisions every other Monday at 15:00. I should aim to deliver products that my supervisor can read trough on Fridays the week before.
Until my next delivery (before Friday 19th of October) I should take a step back and try to think about the broader issues of my research and with this write a first draft of the introduction chapter. After this is completed I should continue with my grunt work on Flickr (content analysis), creating my method as I go and thinking about my supervisors comments above.