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Extracted Abstract:
—Use of archival collections is accelerated by the presence of finding aids, which communicate the arrangement and description of collection contents. To arrive at the optimal arrangement of a collection, archivists rely on some item-level processing or knowledge gained by exploring and manipulating digital reproductions of the contents. In this paper we consider archival student and instructor perspectives from hands-on course experiences directly with two distinct collections: one pertaining to the development, 2017 transfer and launch, and ongoing maintenance of the International Research Portal for Records Related to Nazi-Era Cultural Property (IRP2), and one a selection of unclassified catalog entries about digitized nuclear science reports. Visualizing is a data practice that permits the discovery of key content patterns, identification of computational models to be carried out to aid further analysis, and query-resolution for subject experts with precise – and historically significant – research questions. While archival data visualizations have previously been implemented as an extension of descriptive work including finding aid element counts, here we connect visualization to the work of archival outreach and access. We study how visualizations generated by groups of students working with textual and numerical dataset portions can ultimately accelerate time-sensitive uses of collections. Keywords—computational thinking, information science education, information visualization, provenance research, data transformation I.