We have a new member starting on one of the projects I’m working on, and I’m having to teach her GIS, as she’s never used it before. I’ve covered the basics of Vector vs. Raster, projection systems, navigation, and adding/editing data – a lot to handle (on top of getting up to speed on the project) for someone who’s never used this technology.

Later in our tutorial, another student joined and wanted to go over a dataset. We were using QGIS (a GIS package I’m not entirely familiar with) and the panel that holds information on all the layers currently in the map was not visible. The student who I had just taught GIS said, “Check the View menu. Perhaps it’s in Panels?” Her intuition was correct and we added the panel back to the interface – I was quite surprised an thoroughly impressed by this.

Afterwards, she compared the GIS to Photoshop, saying they’re quite similar, and as long as she thinks about it that way, she should be able to get it. I say, “use whatever works for you so that it makes sense and isn’t intimidating.” I guess I never thought of it like that before, that a GIS program can be compared to some other non-GIS program. Perhaps there’s something to be said about similarities in interfaces and options that if GIS programs were to utilise more regularly would help ensure their successful uptake in research/organisations.

When working in an interdisciplinary team, it’s easy to get caught up in your own discipline. This may be a statement of the obvious, however, it can lead to sub-divisions in the team. At a previous meeting, someone referred to myself and two other members of the team as “The Tech Team”.

For all intents and purpose, we ARE “The Tech Team”, but we are also part of what makes up the whole team. My two co-workers and I try our best to cut the jargon and use generally understandable terms, but does the mention of one or two tech terms reaffirm the branding of “The Tech Team”? Is this a failing on our part? Is the use of these divisive categories, to begin with, damaging to the spirit of the interdisciplinary work or are the sub-divisions just to be expected?

Exciting news, everyone! Dr. Claire Ellul and I have successfully secured a session at RGS-IGB Annual Conference 2012 and have received sponsorship from RGS GIScience Research Group. We would like to invite anyone with relevant experience in interdisciplinary/interorganisational work to submit a 250 word abstract, proposed title, and keywords to Patrick Rickles (p.rickles@ucl.ac.uk) by 16 December, 2012.

For more information, please go to http://bit.ly/uRgiok

I’ve been using Mendeley to handle documents and notes associated with the literature review I’ve been doing for my PhD, as well as document management for the projects I’ve been working on. So far, it’s handled rather well, but it’s also the case of practising what I preach.

I’ve told people on the projects to not only populate metadata about the documents, but to also name them in a sensible way (author_year_title). Going through my own work, I hadn’t actually set things up that way, and I’m paying for it now. Yesterday, I meant to enter some information in when I realised that Menedely wasn’t syncing properly between my desktop and my laptop. Rather than make to many changes to an out of date copy, that could potentially corrupt my main copy, I figured I’d use the time to rename all the files.

Going along with that, I cleaned out my laptop and did a bit of back end tweaking to speed things up. I’m now doing it for my desktop. All of this takes a bit of time, but it pays off in spades by keeping your equipment running in tip-top shape and having things in accessible locations. Sometimes, placing something somewhere or naming it a particular way, at the time, makes sense, but as time progresses, you realise that that way you initially set down, is no longer sustainable.

As annoying as it can be, it’s important to go through, have a clean out, and organise. It’ll help you work much more efficiently/faster afterwards.

So, I’ve been doing my literature review now for 6 months (about 65 books/articles in) and I feel like I’m losing the plot. My initial focus/title was “Spatial Data Sharing in an Interdisciplinary Academic Team” and my primary focus so far has been on Spatial Data Sharing (SDS). This has taken me towards areas such as Metadata, Ontologies, and Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI), but also brought up concepts such as Human Computer Interaction and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

As I understand, the literature review is about wandering; finding concepts and topics and seeing what grabs your fancy, but I’m posed with the further dilemma of making sure it’s relevant to the project I’m a research assistant for. SDS is about how data is generated and shared, which is relevant, but I’m not sure if it’s the way I want to go. CSCW is how a group uses computer systems to make decisions (also relevant), and is at the heart of work that I’ve done in industry for the past 7 years, but not the original direction I was going. HCI (again relevant) is an area I’m finding very interesting, and mixing a lot of things that I like, but I’m not sure what implications are given my original directions. So what do you do: do what you said, do what you know, or do what you want?

The answer is a bit anti-climatic, but is that I have to keep reading. Maybe I use all three? Maybe I go away from my original proposal? Maybe I take a risk and see where it takes me? Whatever the case may be, I’m grateful for the direction and discussions various people have provided me this week. I just need to calm down, relax, and try and figure out exactly what my research question is supposed to answer and regroup.

Apparently this is natural, but I’m finding the “natural” world of the PhD to be one I still need to get used to.

Thomas Malone wrote a great article called “How Do People Organize Their Desks? Implications for the Design of Office Information Systems“. In it, he explains different archetypes of people who may be in your office. Messy people, neat people and how their job may or may not dictate the propensity to them being one way or the other inherently.

Anyway, one major concept he brings up is the idea of files and piles. Files are things that are neatly titled and arranged in some systematic order; whereas piles, on the other hand, are placed in a specific location and that’s sometimes as far as the organisational aspects of piles go. Think about your own desk – why piles do you currently have on it and why are they there and not filed away? Perhaps they require some sort of action (whether immediate or eventual) and that’s why they’re not put away.

I notice that most computer science people tend to be quite organised. Again, my the nature of our work just dictates that. We have to think about things logically, break them down into steps and notice patterns. In interdisciplinary research, you’ll be dealing with people of all sorts, and they likely won’t be organised in the same way. One of the team members had downloaded a GIS dataset, and asked for my help in processing it. When I went to their machine, though, they didn’t remember where they had saved it. As someone who has a system for most things, this idea seemed a bit odd, but something that I need to bear in mind. This person will be accessing datasets I set up for them for the next 3 years. To help their research, I need to know how to get into their mind and understand how they think, so I can make their job easier; not just make them do it my way because I’m the one making the systems.

Another team member was used to using a file that in the GIS world is referred to as a group layer. This is an amalgamation of datasets that you can add to get them all into your GIS program at once, rather than browsing for the individual datasets and adding them one at a time. Due to data being moved, the group layer links to all the layers were no longer functional. Rather than seeking out the individual files and adding them to the GIS, they were absolutely stymied and frustrated that they could no longer access their information. Initially, I had explained how to find the original files and add them, but this didn’t make sense, as this was not the way they were used to working. In the end, I recreated the file and they were relieved to finally have access to their files again.

A computer person may get haughty and think that these things are simple, but that just goes to show how computer scientists continue to design systems for themselves and not for the people who use them. To effectively work together in interdisciplinary environments, we have to understand how each other work, so we speak the same language on the basic points and focus on the bigger picture – how our expertise in our particular fields can help the other push their research to a higher level.

With the project in full swing, it’s important to have a website and online presence. Before developing an all-singing-all-dancing website that would show of my development skills, I thought it’d be a quick win to take the template from the previous project and revamp it for the current one. That was successfully done and lasted us for the first 6 or 7 months of the project.

I then came time to deliver on a slicker looking one, but I was holding off on doing so until we’d secured some logos and branding. From my time in industry, I can tell you that people won’t remember the full statement of the type of work you do, but they will remember a catchy logo. At one time, in one of my previous companies, I made some minor edits to their logo to use it for certain purposes, and I suffered the full wrath of the branding department (yes, there was a whole department dedicated to this) and was educated with a 40 page document explaining exactly how the branding is to look and what you can/can’t do with it. I guess if I spent £45K on something like that, I’d want to make sure it was properly used as well.

Anyway, to get this in place, we decided to advertise a contest with 99designs.com, to get the expertise of as many designers as possible and see if the service they purported to offer was worth using on future projects. I’m happy to say that we were able to get something great and work with a very hard working designer, and have now implemented their designs on various media. People may not remember the long description of our work, but when they see our logo, they’ll know it’s us.

Now, logo in place, I redesigned our previous site using UCL’s supported online Content Management System (CMS), Silva. At first, I found it a bit cumbersome, but in time, I warmed to it. I still prefer WordPress, and think most will still use it, but Silva’s not a bad one. At the end, put the logo in, stepped back and admired my work, and the team was quite pleased.

I made sure when the logo was created to also have a favicon as a part of the main one. A favicon, for those who don’t know it (I didn’t at the time) is a smaller icon (generally a symbol) used to represent you. Think about the blue bird from Twitter, or the blue dot and the pink dot used for Flickr. We now use our favicon for our Twitter account and will also use it for our Facebook page when we launch.

It may not seem important to some, but having some semblence of branding will add professionalism to your project and give people a visual aid to help remember who you are and what you do.

At the time the project started, one of my first challenges was to come up with a way to share documents and references amongst the team. After looking into a few pieces of software/webware, I came across Mendeley. You can easily import current documents, or those you find on the web from things, such as, Google Scholar, and keep them as part of your personal library of references or share them with a group. On top of that, there are plug-ins for OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Word, so you can add citations easily and automatically generate a bibliography at the end. It’s quite interesting, but I wish something like this would’ve been available for when I was doing my MSc dissertation.

Anyway, Mendeley offers a great structure for you to upload documents that they’ll store for you, but I wanted something a bit more flexible. I’ve already been using Dropbox personally for some time now and thought, “I wonder if I can use this for the document storage part…” Well, turns out it’s not that difficult.

1. Get Mendeley and Dropbox
2. Create a folder in Dropbox and share it out to your team members on the network (through Dropbox settings)
3. Have everyone use the same drive letter and map the shared folder as a network drive (ex. L:)
4. In Mendeley, add references to the files, but use the filepath from the L: (ex. L:\mydoc.pdf)
5. You’re done!

Now, anyone on your team can access the files and no one else can. Plus, you can use the versitility of Dropbox to store anything and everything you want. Plus, Dropbox’s storage pricing plans are better than Mendeley’s. 😉

Being the techy person I am, I generally take for granted all the things and programs I use. I have my work and personal calendars, through outlook and Google respectively, synced on my iPhone, as well as all four of my e-mail accounts, so I can know what’s going on and respond as quickly as possible. I have Facebook to keep up with friends, LinkedIn to advertise myself professionally, etc. etc.

Bearing this in mind, I find it strange when I encounter someone who doesn’t use a fraction of these services, or any of them at one. On this project, I have a fair mix of the tech and non-tech savvy, so it’s important to find a communication method that works for everyone. Sometimes, the quickest way to get a response can be occassionally dropping in on the person, to chat and just simply say hello. Though there’s e-mail, Skype, Facebook chat, etc., we shouldn’t forget the necessity to continue to foster personal relationships with people.

The Adaptable Suburbs project brings people from many disciplines together, but my concern is specifically understanding Space Syntax analysis methods and how they can be performed in a GIS. Dr. Kate Jones, my predecessor on the previous project, Towards Sustainable Suburban Town Centres, wrote an excellent article, specifically about the challenges faced.

I have yet to get into this area of analysis, but I’m glad her article gives some foresight into the things to come.