Doctoral student Karin Stahel in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Canterbury is researching the application of interpretable machine learning methods to classify and retrieve articles by genre and topic using the National Library of New Zealand’s Papers Past collection of digitised historical newspapers.
Part of this research involves a user study, the purpose of which is to help us understand:
- Who are the main users of the Papers Past digitised historical newspaper collection and why are they using it?
- How do users of Papers Past interact with the collection through existing interfaces and tools?
- How effective do users find existing interfaces and tools?
- How do users of Papers Past perceive genre and topic in relation to the retrieval of digitised historical newspaper articles?
PHANZA members are invited to participate in an online survey that explores these questions. Your participation in the research will assist with the development of new ways to discover articles in Papers Past. There is no obligation to participate in this study and your responses will be kept completely confidential. The study has been reviewed and approved by the University of Canterbury Human Research Ethics Committee (ref: 2024/40/LR-PS).
If you choose to take part in this research, please follow the link below to the online survey, which includes an information page and consent form. The survey involves answering a series of questions about how you use the Papers Past collection, followed by questions about genre and topic in digitised historical newspapers. The survey should take you around 20-30 minutes to complete. At the end of the survey you will have the option to provide your email address if you are interested in participating in subsequent stages of the research. To preserve the anonymity of your survey responses during the analysis stage, the email address you provide will be stored separately to your other survey responses.
You can take part in the survey by following this anonymous link: Take the survey
If you have any questions about the research, please contact me at karin.stahel@pg.canterbury.ac.nz.
The survey will remain open until Friday 22 November 2024.