Category: Blog
Diverse Minds is a personal blog reflecting on life, work, user experience, information science, education, and technology.
5 Tips for staying organized and productive while working from home.
Coronavirus (COVID-19) has forced many people to work from home so that they can be safe. To help with the challenge of working from home, Robin Naughton, Jessie Zairo, and Margaret Hade teamed up to provide tips on how to stay organized and productive while working from home. There are five tips and a bonus!
SciVizNYC 2018: Beyond a Scan: Exploring the process of digitizing and sharing rare books and manuscripts
In this SciViz 2018 talk, Dr. Naughton discusses the digitization process and how to take a physical object and create a digital collection or online exhibit for anyone to explore.
The GreyLit Report: Understanding the Challenges of Finding Grey Literature
In this poster, Danielle Aloia, MSLS, and Robin Naughton, Ph.D., explored how researchers and librarians search for grey literature. They conducted a review of the health science literature for articles that used grey literature for systematic review searching and interviewed researchers and librarians about their search strategy.
Adding Kanban for Outlook Tasks
Outlook tasks are good on their own, but sometimes you want a bit more. Since I’ve been using Kanban, a project management method, I wanted my Outlook tasks to reflect that style.
Tech Tips: Batch Create Folders (PC)
Today’s topic is about batch processing. I rather enjoy batch processing because it is an opportunity to learn the intricate nature of a process and then design a method to automate that process. The batch process below is quick and easy to do on a PC.
A Personal List Notebook
Writing things down has always been my way to learn and to remember, and as such, I have developed habits that help to keep me productive and reflective. I write lists in my notebook. I find lists to be exactly right for being productive and for keeping track of what I’ve done, what I’m currently doing, and what I’m planning to do next. Some of these lists turn into checklists, but they mostly record my thoughts and plans.
A Visual Resume
Although the traditional resume/cv has a chronology, it is difficult to express overlapping work experiences in a way that shows multiple levels of engagement, particularly non-traditional and diverse paths. As a reflective experiment, the traditional resume/cv is re-imagined in a way that turns chronology on its side. It is a …
Job Rejections
Today’s job application process is badly designed, convoluted, and a test of sanity. It is designed not to hire, but rather to check boxes and create negative experiences. Going through the process, it is easy to notice that the systems and the humans don’t work well with each other. The …
The Best American Essays 2012
On my next airport expedition, I picked up The Best American Essays 2012. I was in search of some change in my reading habits and a desire to learn new things.
Interview Glass Cube
There are moments when you realize that the interview is like being arrested, getting locked in a room with no windows and sitting at a table waiting to be grilled.
Designing Public Library Websites for Teens: A Conceptual Model
My dissertation research, Designing Public Library Websites for Teens: A Conceptual Model, directed by Dr. Denise Agosto, explores teen library websites (TLWs), public library websites for teens, by investigating teens’ mental models of TLWs and designer models as embedded in current TLWs. At the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI) and TLWs, …
Pet Peeves: IE9 Favorites
If you consider yourself a designer in any sense of the word, then you probably see design solutions that just gets on your last nerves.
Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do
Working is an oral history done in the mid-1970s. People talk about their working lives and what it means to them. There are nine books that cover a variety of themes pertaining to the work that people are doing ranging from working the land to finding a calling.
The Time-to-Degree Conundrum
“Graduate students take longer and longer to finish because we don’t reward quick finishers with academic jobs. In fact, we do quite the opposite.”
Interaction Design in the Wild
Yvonne Rodger’s article “Interaction design gone wild: striving for wild theory,” begins to touch on the inherent problem of theory and practice. HCI theory draws from many domains, but no one theory maps completely or produces exact results. Thus, there is a break-down between what is theorized and what is practiced. One problem which the article is trying to address is the fact that much of theory is based on controlled lab experiments, which are good for some things but not everything.