[nfais-l] NFAIS Enotes, Pinterest and Figshare

[jilloneill at nfais.org]

NFAIS Enotes, February 2012
Written and compiled by Jill O’Neill
 
Learning to Share: Images and Data
 
Pinterest ([http://www.pinterest.com/] http://www.pinterest.com) has attracted a huge amount of interest during the first quarter of 2012. The fact that there would be eleven million unique monthly users, each spending slightly in excess of an hour and a half on the site each month, created avid interest throughout many social media circles (see: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/07/pinterest-monthly-uniques/] http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/07/pinterest-monthly-uniques/). The visual content curation platform is, in the words of founder Ben Silbermann, intended to help users “plan and discover things.” The site is highly visual in nature (and thus appealing to retailers) and is useful in those instances where pictures may be a more efficient means of communicating an ideal or soliciting input from others. Visit the first page of the site and you will see photos of clothing, home interiors, gourmet cuisine and much more identified by a predominantly female user base as being of value or interest, whether due to a detail, color, or shape. The social network is a designer’s inspiration and a retailer’s paradise.
 
There is the broadest classification scheme in place. Thirty-two very general categories cover just about every possible use of images, graphics and design --architecture, art, print & posters, photography, science & nature, fitness, etc. But these categories are entirely loose. Click on fitness and you are as likely to find a photo of a flower girl’s dress as a chart offering up a plyometric pyramid workout. Serendipitous discovery is at the core of Pinterest but, as might be expected of any bulletin board, it can quickly become a mess.
 
From an interface and navigational approach, the site appears to have mimicked Facebook most closely. The user has a limited number of ways to respond to any single post (re-pin, like or comment). Re-pinning is a euphemism for a single user’s bookmarking of a favorite image for later review. If you want a larger view of the image, a click increases the size and the number of activity options. You can share on Twitter or Facebook. You can embed an image elsewhere (but only the image without any associated original text). To see how this looks, click through 
[http://basilisk-stare.blogspot.com/2012/03/source-mountainmamacooks.html] http://basilisk-stare.blogspot.com/2012/03/source-mountainmamacooks.html.  More conventionally, you can email the same pin to a friend or as a worst-case scenario, report an offensive or infringing item. Scroll further down and you’re shown the screen name of the original pinner, and a source page on Pinterest – an aggregation of items associated with a particular resource site. You’ll also be shown how the image got onto Pinterest (whether via bookmarklet or upload) and statistics for who re-pinned the item or who merely evidenced a liking. 
 
Navigation can initially be confusing. Clicking on a link that appears to be the source of an image you find interesting may be a mistake. That link at the top of the image directs you to the original web source. That link, at the bottom of the image? That one directs you to the source’s page on Pinterest. 
 
Pinterest, like so many organizations seeking to take advantage of social data, allows the user to connect with friends from two other prominent networks –Facebook and Gmail -- but that number is sure to expand. One chooses to follow a person or just one of that person’s “boards.” Following everyone and everything is sure to overwhelm, but again serendipitous discovery of creative material is the whole point behind Pinterest. 
 
Searching the site is sadly a problem. It is not possible to refine searches or specify a particular facet for the search and consequently one is apt to be inundated with results. The engine is only searching text captions rather than the names of boards assigned by users. There is only one instance where one can restrict by dollar figure and that’s under the category of Gifts. Otherwise, a single search query of a generic term (salsa) brings up recipes, yarn and bicycles, all of which have captions containing the word “salsa.” Searching for various brand names (Pepsi, Elsevier, Amazon) brings up only slightly more specific results. It is clear that the Pinterest engineers are depending upon actual images to drive interest and attention, and spammers have caught onto this as a way to enhance their own visibility. One sample item pointed to a DIY video and read “Concrete counter tutorial (and book recommendation at the end). Might have to get it on Amazon” then there was an ellipses with an irrelevant clause immediately after “I saw this product on TV and have already lost 24 pounds!” It was then followed by the name of the weight loss company. 
 
Examples of particular works or styles may be found if the search query includes proper names (Mies van der Rohe or Jacques Louis David) or more specific phrases such as broderie anglaise. However, duplicative hits are a problem and frequently, the wisdom of the crowds is less than authoritative. Try as I might, I don’t see much evidence on Pinterest that it might be any kind of a useful tool for scholars and researchers in the visual arts. 
 
Images in scientific publishing – scientific illustration – are in need of improvement for many reasons. A recent article in Scientific American, “Pixels or Perish” by Brian Hayes, is a worthwhile read for the light it sheds on new forms of quantitative graphics, beyond pie charts and graphs (see: [http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.14718,y.0,no.,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx] http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.14718,y.0,no.,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx).
A post-doc in the college of optical sciences at the University of Arizona backs up Hayes’ view (see: [http://schamberlain.github.com/2012/02/science-publications-need-interactive-graphics/] http://schamberlain.github.com/2012/02/science-publications-need-interactive-graphics/)  when he noted that “while Science and Nature --just to name two prominent examples of scientific journals--make available HTML versions of their articles, it seems like most of the interactivity is limited to looking at larger versions of figures in the articles.” To be fair, he notes that this may well be as much the fault of authors for not submitting visual forms of interactive content as the fault of major STM publishers. 
 
Curiously, I have attracted only one follower over on Pinterest and that is a gentleman by the name of Mark Hahnel, an emerging player in the convergence of social networking and scientific images. He found me on Pinterest, because he is trying to increase the visibility of his own branded site, FigShare, a specialized site for sharing of images that was referenced by a speaker during the NFAIS Annual Conference. Figshare ([http://www.figshare.com/] www.figshare.com), a cloud-based storage site intended to enhance the discovery and visibility of visual research materials including video, data sets and photographic images, was initially launched in 2011 as a proof-of-concept site, but had been re-launched in January 2012 via funding from Digital Science, a digital division of Macmillan. Figshare also encourages users to upload dissertations, applications for funding, conference posters and more to the site to enhance its value. (see: [http://figshare.com/blog/The%20unlimited%20scholarly%20publication/19] http://figshare.com/blog/The%20unlimited%20scholarly%20publication/19). 
 
The site has gotten some attention for its efforts, such as this general write-up on the BMJ blog, [http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj-journals-development-blog/2012/02/17/figshare-striving-for-greater-efficiency-in-scientific-research/] http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj-journals-development-blog/2012/02/17/figshare-striving-for-greater-efficiency-in-scientific-research/. In addition, citations to data housed on Figshare are popping up in articles, such as this one at [http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030908] http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030908 – (note specifically citations numbers 10 and 11). 
 
Glance at the home page of Figshare and there are obvious social network parallels to Pinterest.  The marketing copy points out that materials contained here are discoverable, shareable and citable. A note in the fine print explains that the materials are covered through a Creative Commons license. There is a grid display of the various media available to browse as well as the usage data regarding views and sharing of particular items. The categorization on Figshare is confined to only 13 disciplinary groups, slightly more than a third of the number on Pinterest. There are links to researcher profiles. It’s even possible to slice and dice the content while browsing the site. View the most popular uploads according to the specific type of file format (figures, media, data sets, and file sets).
 
Figshare functionality is fairly basic, but it appears to be a viable environment for housing various supplemental materials useful to others. The actual upload of materials to the site is as elementary as the drag-and-drop process of adding an attachment to Gmail. Search is text-based, depending upon the title information and additional context provided. Tagging is possible. The system allows for exportation of a citation to Reference Manager, Endnote and Mendeley. The material uploaded for public use on Figshare is crawled by search engines, thus making it ripe for serendipitous discovery. There is the additional plus for researchers that Figshare offers both private as well as public storage for data and other content formats and Figshare itself promises that the platform will soon become a collaborative platform space for research as well ([http://figshare.com/features] http://figshare.com/features). 
 
Figshare is unlikely to build the same kind of excitement in social media circles as Pinterest has done. For one thing, the icon on Figshare used to denote the availability of a dataset is a grey grid-like icon that has little to attract the eye. The thumbnail images are smaller than those found on Pinshare. Still, research scientists seeking out data sets don’t use the same criteria as interior designers use in their investigations. 
 
Access to data is expected to only grow in importance as a mechanism for uncovering new truths and understanding in science. It’s not unreasonable for Digital Science, as a subsidiary of Macmillan, to expect that community will grow on a platform where that data is housed and made discoverable. Macmillan as parent company will naturally want to foster the growth of that community and other providers will watch to see how successfully they manage that growth. I will say that as far as I could tell in my rummaging about, such a community has not yet coalesced. 
 
What Figshare and Pinterest have in common, besides both being publicly accessible Web-based services are three fairly common sense principles:
 

Neither 	tried to reinvent the social network in terms of basic platform 	architecture or user interface, in the way that something like 	Google+ tried to.

Both 	recognized and tried to adapt to users’ existing need for sharing

Both 	were responsive when issues arose with their initial approach. When 	Pinterest was called on copyright concerns by a 	lawyer-photographer-user 	([http://www.businessinsider.com/pinterest-copyright-issues-lawyer-2012-2] http://www.businessinsider.com/pinterest-copyright-issues-lawyer-2012-2), 	the CEO reached out to keep her engaged with the site and reassessed 	the problematic terms of service currently in place on the site. 	Although initially launched in 2011, Figshare gathered feedback from 	users and re-launched with a dramatically redesigned platform in 	January of 2012. 
 
It would appear then that we’re in a period where technologies are being adapted to specific use cases. It is less about what is the next big thing and more about recombining and tweaking to better satisfy the needs of a community. It’s not as exciting perhaps as the early days of the Web in the ‘90’s, but it may be just as disruptive should nimble young start-ups reach the finish line of user adoption before the more established platform providers. What’s key to recall (as so many speakers did during the NFAIS Annual Conference) is that NFAIS members do not need to come up with new technologies. The requisite technologies are already available to us. What users are hoping for is that we will innovatively combine those technologies to create the best advanced information services we can in service of their needs. 
 
2012 NFAIS Supporters
 
Access Innovations, Inc.
Accessible Archives, Inc.
American Psychological Association/PsycINFO
CAS
CrossRef
Data Conversion Laboratory, Inc.
Defense Technical Information Center
EBSCO Publishing
Getty Research Institute
The H. W. Wilson Foundation
Information Today, Inc.
IFIS
OCLC
Philosopher’s Information Center
ProQuest
Really Strategies, Inc.
Silverchair Information Systems
TEMIS, Inc.
Thomson Reuters IP & Science
Thomson Reuters IP Solutions
Unlimited Priorities LLC
 
 
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