Dr. Adam Medusin comes to us from Harvard University, where he presented a dissertation called entitled The Old Syrian Social Network, an analysis based on the text from Kanesh, 1950 to 1750 BCE. He is currently a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the digital humanities here at UC Berkeley. And he's been working on a number of projects related to social networks. And so if there's a little time after his talk, then you can do a live demo of a related project that he's also working on inside. Thank you, Adam. Thank you. Thank you, Niko. Exciting to be here. I'm so glad to be able to talk with fellow archaeologists. I think that most of you will probably be familiar already with a lot of what I'll talk about. Kultepet Kanesh, it's a fairly well-known site nowadays. But I hope to show kind of a process of how we go from some of the most challenging aspects of archaeology that being unprovenanced artifacts and unknown locations to more statistical and close controlled recontextualizations of these archaeological data sets. So the primary sources I work with come from one peripheral Bronze Age site known as Kultepet in Turkey, which initially yielded more than 5,000 unprovenanced Cappadocian tablets. The majority of these were sold in bazaars and collected by Western museums before World War II. And after decades of textual scholarship by a small group of international scholars, which my work has benefited from, I focused on situating these texts in a reconstructed social and geographical setting, which can be analyzed and described using a network analysis and other computational methods. Archaeology in the Middle East or in the Near East, as it's known for, has long and illustrious history with more than 150 years of scholarship. From the 1840s onward, Western archaeologists like Sir Austin Henry Layard made early discoveries of textual and material artifacts in the heart from the heart of Mesopotamia, and awoke deep curiosity and deciphering the beginnings of human history. Unfortunately, these discoveries inadvertently incentivized a significant amount of looting in the area, resulted in thousands of unprovenance artifacts. When we walk through the museums, the British Museum and the Louvre and the Met, we notice it, right? I mean, it's something that we notice while at the same time not noticing. And so the same goes for this site. And the first horde of texts that were found came from locals. So beginning in the 19th century, a common era, a number of cuneiform tablets emerged in these antiquities markets, first appearing in the bazaars and eventually reaching the major museums of Europe and America. Professor Archibald Henry Seis, the curator of the British Museum, reported one such discovery. In 1881, Dr. Pinches drew attention to two cuneiform tablets, one in the British Museum and the other in the Louvre, as they were said to come from Kayseri. He proposed for them the name Cappadocian. Just before the war, 1,200 tablets, mostly in a perfect condition, were discovered by the peasants, 800 of which were seized by the Turkish government, but the rest found their way into the hands of dealers. Some of them came to Paris and were bought by the Baudelaire Library and Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, as well as by myself. What has become of the others I have failed to learn. So we see that, of course, a lot of these collections ended up in private collections as well as museums. Since the initial discovery, more than 5,000 unprovidence Cappadocian tablets were collected by these museums. After deciphering the script, they were able to determine that these are the remains of an intricate Assyrian trade network, which dated back to 1950 BCE. After the war, Turkish archaeologists were able to resume excavations at the site from 1948 onward. However, due to the dislocated process involved in the preservation and curation of the tablets, it has been extremely difficult to re-establish the location of these initial 5,000 at the site, in particular the rooms in which these archives were kept within the private houses. So for example, one such account from the director of the excavation during, from 1948 until quite recently in 2000, Taksin Uzguc wrote, in his field reports, an archive of 947 tablets and unopened envelopes and pottery was found in two small rooms. They were evidently kept on wooden shelves against the walls. The tablets were found on the floor along the walls. Were those that fell off the shelves in the fire. The tablets had been packed in bags and straw wrappings. And sacks were discovered in piles in the middle of the rooms. A group of the tablets, as usual, were kept in pots. Pottery was set along the base of the walls. Next to the hearth were found unbaked tablets evidently left dry or prepared to be fired. So that's all we have in terms of the real documentation, a number, 947 tablets from a general area where we know they're excavating from the other artifacts that came at the time. Unfortunately, there are no further details as to the tablet numbers, museum numbers that were given to these tablets once they were pulled from the ground, moved away from the site and then located in the museum or anything that would help us link the individual tablets to the rooms which they were found. For example, a house plan number or a grid coordinate or a locus or some kind of stratigraphy. They'll distinguish general stratigraphy from different periods and time in the site but nothing very close, unfortunately. So what their excavation reports do tell us are the few published details about the clues of the Assyrian filing system. So in particular, these tablets were located on the floor above what appeared to be with something above appearing to have looked like broken shelving. And we know from other ancient Mesopotamian sites like Sipar that we find shelving like this and there could be some similarity drawn. This, in fact, is a door from the Ankara Museum and they still seal the tablet room. They literally seal it. They'll break it open, cut it open each day and then at the end of the day, they'll bring it together and press together some sealing over these wires exactly as the Assyrians described their archive rooms as well sealed in the same way, if funny enough. So, and then where they also kept these tablets in pots and sometimes baked in the hearth. Naturally what little we're told only raises more questions. So how did each merchant file their tablets? Because this isn't an administrative center. These are private merchants so focused on long distance trade. Each of them had their own kind of writing style to a certain degree and we can see that in the text. Their hand is evident rather than a scribal tradition that we find in Southern Mesopotamia and Sumer. And do we see any consistent practices within the colony either from the Assyrian or Anatolian households? And that's another thing that this group of texts it helps us to understand is that it's clear from 1948 onward that the excavations have and that the archeologists have kind of pointed to different types of households that have yielded different types of artifacts and these types happen to be either Assyrian which makes up the majority of the site. Sorry this is blurry but this is maybe a little clear. Assyrian with like scattered in between here Anatolian houses as well or so-called Anatolian houses. Now of course the cultural ramifications of all this is lost very often because we're working so late in antiquity but from the texts we've been able to note that at least going off of naming practices which isn't a sure fire way to distinguish cultural or ethnic background but at least using naming practices we can identify four distinct Anatolian naming types. So we find Hurrian, Hittite, Hattie and Louvian names and these names come in somewhat of like clusters in the site as well with the large majority being Assyrian names. So with what little I could use from the archeological side of things the plans and the field reports I then focused on the relationships between the families as they were recorded in the texts. And that in and of itself was what kind of took up the bulk of my research when I was working on this for two years ago. On the basis of close readings it was clear that the initial 5,000 tablets discovered before Turkish excavations came from one general region this region at the site of Kultepe and after making a composite map of the published texts and comparing the houses with the descriptions and what little was known from the excavation reports we could begin to reconstruct the extensive lists of persons and family trees which were conveyed through the texts by aggregating mentions of the same individuals across these 6,000 tablets basically. And what initially became quite clear looking focusing on this site at least was the real prominence of the merchants that were living here and I'll explain kind of how I could make a claim like that in a minute. But at least from the texts themselves I could revolve and able collectively through for the last like 50 years to start to establish family trees that extend across six generations. And by linking the certain archives back to the room numbers where they were presumably excavated we can then hypothesize a certain number of generations that may have lived in the house. So Pushuken is unambiguously mentioned more than any other merchant about 450 times across these texts. And from the networks that I've reconstructed it's clear that his ties run deep in many directions and extending into the Assyrian royal families as well. So indicated by letters to the king and the sons of the king, the prince, the rubatum and branching into the far reaches of the Bronze Age market in the distant hubs of Anishholia where he lived at least part of the time in his life. He died in or at least he may have died in Durhumit which is an unknown location still being trying to be determined by a combination of texts and archeological practices. So no doubt because of this merchant's high profile he was privy to a broader perspective and his advantage as a leader in the trade also extended to his children. From his oldest son Buzazu to his youngest daughter Ahaha who was a gubabtum, a type of priestess in Ashur. She was afforded a house of her own that she was maintaining for the family there and they frequently write letters back and forth. So she's a thousand kilometers distant from this site and yet here in the archive very present and involved especially at these critical moments of death and lawsuits, the lawsuits that ensue when a wealthy merchant, an established merchant dies because all the creditors come in all of a sudden and want to make sure they get theirs. So it's very clear that these family trees are evident from the texts and that they kind of compiled private dossiers, what we can call them, archives is maybe a little too grandiose a word for these. Unfortunately we have no foolproof way of knowing the extent to which these dossiers came together collectively into an archive because again these are unprovidence texts, these were just pulled from the ground. Nor can we easily establish the boundaries of this archive between himself and his children knowing in particular that his son Buzazu had a house of his own as well in another location. So there are a number of questions about how these texts came to be at this site and if there are other texts at other sites that could give us more details into this trade colony but from what we can see they're copying these tablets and they're sending copies of these tablets back to the capital and keeping a copy locally as well. Okay, so that's one major family at the site and the second is that of M.D. Ilum. So he was clearly a wealthy creditor and kind of the cash flow behind the network. From his family tree we have he and his daughter who are present in very close quarters, what's being called a neighborhood or a block at least by the archeologist and while she was living here he was married to an Assyrian initially who then died and she remarried to an Anatolian and named their children a combination of Assyrian and Anatolian names. So that starts to give you an inkling of the problems we're up against when we're talking about the culture that exists in the Middle East or the culture that exists at this site as evidence from the text that it's convoluted. But a number of these, so these are just like a kind of initial gist of what we can do with some of these family trees and trying to locate them on a plan that's been georectified. So all of this essentially goes into a place where we can hypothesize where some of these people may have lived as well based on as they're, within the text they're talking about our neighbor so and so and we'll be able to kind of provide some geospatial metadata for each of these nodes in the network. But while at the same time so it allows us to further establish like more extensive family trees as well as this starts to become relational data that we see together. And with this we can start to get a sense of a chronological time span. So in demography they call these you know cohorts and they're able to date the ages of people or at least how long they were active in the network based on these cohort time lifespans. So throughout the process the social network which was generated from the text themselves serves as a relational control for each name recorded on each tablet corresponding to the six generations of families who lived at Connash and between Connash and Oshwer between 1950 and 1850 with a resurgence around 1750. So most of this that we see here in the network is really just 100 years, 80 to be more precise but then there's a smaller group of Anatolians that continue after that. Such tools allow us to analyze both the familial and the extended relationship stepping outside the confines of just a family archive which is really how the field so far has been focused into a more full extent of neighboring cliques and partnerships that extend not just within Connash but across the entire Anatolian plain. So what's important to reiterate here is that this network is not a simple aggregation. It's not just text as data being forced together but rather a detailed database that's internally cross-referenced to a number of important attributes. Names of the people being a major one, any place names as well and then a lot of what's taken from the tablets are contextual markers. You'll notice here that there's a cylinder seal. Cylinder seals are a valuable tool for presuppographical studies. And so each of these like components, not just the names but a lot of what's happening on the tablet as well as what the tablet itself is made of. So we're getting, we've been using a PRX scanner, PXRF scanner, sorry, for some of the tablets in Ankara to establish perhaps to assess whether we can distinguish between clay types coming from local Anatolian clay versus the Syrian clay a thousand kilometers distant. Now of course there are other clay sources in Anatolia as we can see here. So based on the knowledge of the sites that these Assyrians are mentioning in their texts, we can show the range of villages or cities if you will, colonies at least in outposts within which the most prominent merchants were connected. So Pushu Ken as we mentioned before by far the most influential but looking at his influence within his own neighborhood as well as across the complete network, we're able to see his central position in the network had to do with his ability to forge more numerous relationships on the boundaries of the network. Kind of a cosmomedici of his time in that his ability to have this high position in the network was his ability to make relationships in contracts with people that extended outside of the regular Syrian network and gave him access to local networks. So that included wealthy investors at the capital washer but as well as the people on the ground who had access to copper mines in Dorhumit up north most likely, I mean they're within some range. And so using the computational approaches the networks allow us, we can go through this process of geo rectifying individuals and their attestation of these place names and this can help fill in the gaps of what we don't know where certain places might be based on the push and pull between the social network and the locations that they're mentioning. But of course even with working with a data driven analysis we're always making assumptions and interpretations along with our new discoveries and working with network models. I've learned how to adopt this structural scaffolding in order to accommodate this kind of like fuzzy nature that we're dealing with when you don't have control on the ground using probabilistic distributions with as much granularity and transparency as the texts themselves reflect. So again each of these nodes represents a tablet or an entry in a tablet and all of that is recorded at the level of the artifact not divorced from it. So then we're able to show the density of the entire network atomized over the course of the documentation and in doing so we can see the degree to which particular merchants traveled across the 40 mentioned place names in the texts. This is more of an affiliation or like which places were mentioned the most in terms of the heat map on the background not necessarily with like certainty as to where these places are located. So this is ongoing research of course with archeologists that continue to return to these sites and in a sense to try to find out where especially Prushadum is it's a still very kind of debatable place. But that matters less from the texts as far as the texts are concerned there are a certain specific number of times that place has been mentioned and we can then get a sense of who's going where when as well as which places appear to be the hubs of the network in terms of the trade that's occurring there for different reasons of course. Bronze refineries here and here, copper mines, Kanishk itself was kind of the portal to a lot of this what's called this copper circuit at the time. And then a Zalpa probably is like an entry pole offshore here then and with a lot of the other materials coming from presumably Iran and Afghanistan for the tin and mostly that tin is what's being carried on donkey back over the thousand kilometers to be traded for silver in order to alloy with copper for the bronze age. So this can be done then on a large scale as well as a local scale for establishing more proximate provenance. But by fixing these texts that we know came from certain households we can then probabilistically aggregate those texts with unknown provenance through the social component. And other mentions of houses and offices and contracts for example are helpful in that regard. Using the ties that bind them socially essentially to the neighborhoods from which they came. The results of this work have sparked a new interest in the utility of these ancient texts especially from archeologists who've largely ignored the texts because of the initial kind of divorce that happens when texts are found in excavation hurried and sent off to a museum to be numbered and curated rather than contextualized on the site. So I've been working more with Turkish archeologists on ways to correlate not just the family tree data but these kind of neighborhoods that are taking shape textually with the private houses and the human remains found in the houses. This includes they have a lot of teeth samples from humans from different rooms and working with an archeologist who's looking at strontium levels and her theory is that she can see a division between Anatolian and Syrians in the strontium levels. Well if that's the case then I can explain based on who may have been living in the house that she's looking at whether their names were a Syrian or Anatolian. Not actually anything that the strontium level would dictate necessarily because as you saw in some of these family trees they were intermarried. And so it's an interesting question at least though and one that peaks the curiosity of archeologists to say but can a data set from the texts inform a method that we're using right now to try to establish who lived in the house. Okay, so lastly it's equally important to me that this process of digitization and online curation or curation through databases attempts to right the wrongs of kind of this past that we're dealt with in the Middle East and Near East rather than ignoring the long colonialist legacy which is often accompanied archeology in this region. Today's digital archeologists can make their data public contextualizing their history rather than incentivizing the purchase price of these artifacts and tablets don't cost much so it's easy to buy a thousand at a time as we've seen in the news recently with Hobby Lobby purchasing 5,000 and 600 and getting caught again for another thousand. So and they're easy to find as well it's just a matter of going in your back yard and digging them up I guess if you live in the right place. So by leaving the artifacts where they're found we can hope for better practices of contextualization through digitization in the future and that's really like where I feel like the work that I'm doing is trying to push that envelope and saying yes there are limitations to working with the bull colossi but if you can digitize them and if you can print them in 3D then it changes the game and even without 3D printing we have so many ways of working with the data that we can kind of begin to remove this need of putting our hands on everything and I think that that's really where a field like mine in a seriology and ancient Near Eastern studies has a chance to shine now because there's no way we're gonna get our hands on these in any time soon. So thank you very much for your patience and interest. I'm happy to take questions but I'm also happy to kind of demo the network software a little bit more. I imagine that that's maybe where interests lie less so in like my Google Earth renditions of these houses more so in the network analysis and maybe the statistical components of that because that's been highly useful in this work using the statistical measurements of the network to determine who's who in the network and then why they're there. But I'm also happy to take questions. Okay, cool, perfect. Okay, let me mirror my screen, that'll be easier. Oh, did it do it? Show mirroring options in menu bar? No, mirror displays, there we go. Okay, and I think it's probably, what if I optimize for mine? Yeah, that's better. Okay, I didn't tell it to close. Shoot, okay, I'll reopen it. Geffy, I'm using Geffy as kind of a starting point and from once you get data into Geffy you can export it in JSON files and graph ML files into more sophisticated network software like Cytoscape. But I recommend it and I teach it in the classes I'm working with this semester and last year too. It's open source and it works on any type of computer. Let's see. So I have four different networks here. I'll start actually with one that we've been working on and unfortunately the visuals are not that great. So within Geffy you have this nice front end visualization tool that's useful if you're getting down into the details and you wanna know exactly what one of these nodes is so you click on it and then it gives you the data that you've encoded into the model. But if where you live on a day-to-day basis it's usually in the data table itself and you're giving attributes to the texts that you're working with let's say. So each of these are individuals mentioned in texts. We have, we've signed an ID to a particular person and we note in this case the two numbers that correspond to the texts. Now this is work that Nick Feldhaus and I have been working on this semester with a URAP team. So all this data is coming from ORAC, the online corpus of Kineiform literature and texts. So we're starting off with texts that have been lemmatized which allows us to do something really cool which is for each individual we can say what their role is in the text in really like simplistic terms. These texts were three texts. So from day-to-day from 2100 to 2004 BC about 50 to 100 years before the oldest Syrian texts or the oldest Syrian texts were written. And so there's really just like a 50-year gap between these two which made it a really interesting dataset for me to work on subsequently. So within, so aside from what we can pull from the texts themselves including the role and if there's a profession that's mentioned, that you know the different texts that these people are mentioned in and then the years that are joined when we join texts together. You notice that there are a couple of other statistical measurements that were generated called authority, hub and eigenvector centrality, the number of others. These are like eigenvalues. Eigenvalues are essentially the yin and the yang of the network. So if you think about a social network you have people that you point to like say let's say people that you tend to write emails to and you have people who tend to write emails to you. So there's a directionality that occurs within every network. And this directionality is really valuable for telling us who's who in the network. So if I'm the type of person who only rarely writes an email but I receive emails constantly you know then I would be someone who's considered in the know, is equivalent to the hub. So and then the inverse of that would be an authority. Someone writing and telling people do this and that. Eigenvector centrality has to do with the quote unquote leader. So it's a leader metric. It's someone who doesn't necessarily have a lot of ties or relationships to other people. Maybe fewer relationships to others but those relationships that they do have are with people who have very many relationships to others. If you think of like the CEO around a table he talks to maybe seven people but those seven people are talking each to like hundreds of people probably. So that CEO would have a very high Eigenvector. So these are statistics that can be measured very easily within this setting. Once you've given the properties of the network based on these types of the yin and the yang, the pull, the push in the pull, who's receiving something? Who is sending something? Well who is the source of something being sent? All of that was documented on these texts. And just those three categories who's receiving, who's sending and who's the source will tell us immediately a lot about the statistics of the network.  It's just a run button. Average clustering coefficient, Eigenvector centrality. Which of course is dangerous for someone who doesn't actually know what these algorithms do but the nice thing is is that it's contextualized right here in front of you and then you can come to this place in the appearance and look at, let's say in the appearance tab we'll look at the size. Let's make the size based on the rank of Eigenvector centrality. With the minimum being 10 and the maximum, let's make it 50. And then the network changes its property and you can begin to see. So let's do that same thing for color now and choose the same measurement. Let's see, maybe if I turn it to white it would be more visible. And we can then see, okay, so it's not, so it's Shulgi Irimu, Nalu. I'll admit to some degree but he's really the leader of this. Now let's take a look at this guy. Shulgi Irimu and let's look at, okay, so we don't have any profession. We don't have any profession listed on the text. So if you're just close reading these texts, you wouldn't know just innately who he was. He doesn't declare who he is but if you look at his role, he's every time recipient in every instance and all the texts that were joined together he's the recipient of the goods being traded here in this colony. So that tells you something. Eigenvector centrality is equivalent to recipient. Okay, I mean this is like really basic and of course this all has to be contextualized more but let's do it again. Let's look then at go back to size and change it to the hub and apply that. And all of a sudden it changes properties entirely, okay. So let's look here and see. This guy and we have to probably change the text size too. Okay and now it looks like a totally different network and we see Abashaga. Abashaga's profession again, he doesn't list anything but the role that he occupies again almost every time except with a few recipients, he's the source. And these things are mostly animals. Draem texts, this is the Draem archive which are mostly like animals being traded in a peripheral place on the Sumerian kind of or three administrative state at the time, city state. So the nice thing is that you can then go in and textually understand why he's the hub. What is this statistic actually telling me but contextualizing it by the texts? That's really helpful because otherwise how do you teach eigenvector centrality? Well you do it through linear algebra but who's gonna take class on linear algebra to learn what eigenvector centrality is? I mean I don't see any hands popping up. So instead we can teach it through a more hands-on place that actually gets them rooted in what's happening with context that they're already interested in. So let's change it one last time to this authority metric and we see again the network changes entirely. It's now we're looking at Aradmu with Shugi Irimu who is the leader being like a prominent node but not nowhere near as much as Aradmu. And here again, no profession. So these are people who are just assumed, they're just assumed that they're leaders because they don't have to put their title down. And the texts are pretty clear that they have these places and then we look and in almost every instance he's the representative, he's the via, via. So something's taken by this guy to from the source to the recipient and he's the representative. Now it's pretty cool to have this kind of control over 15,000 Sumerian tablets. Like this is the aggregation of the tablets and then to be able to jump into the back and say, okay, well, which texts are we talking about here? And then to like click on it and drop this into the online database. I mean, it's immediate and you can be working with the texts at the same time very easily. And all of this is open source and it works just by importing spreadsheets. So there's not a huge hurdle to enter into this realm if you dare, right? Because it's always about the trick of it isn't necessarily what we're looking at now. This is what's called the nodes list. This is the data that each node carries with it and the metadata. The trick of it of course is the edges. Network analysis measures relationships, not just data points like most databases but the relationship between data points. And so we're going, we're assign each node an ID and that ID is used as either a source or a target. And that's the explicit relationship. It's directed and then that edge is given an ID and it's given a weight. That's the important part. That gives it the kind of structural push and pull in the network. And then here we also provide the years that are tested for this edge and the text in some cases. So that's one example. And I think like a real prime example, one that we worked on recently, there's of course others. This is the old Assyrian network. It's still being disambiguated by hand because there's so much proponomy within this text. So there's so many people using the same name over the six generations and that we have a grandfather who will name a grandchild his name before he dies or maybe as he dies, the parents name that. It mostly happens through the male line but there are a few examples of females named after their grandfathers and then you get proponomy happening across genders. The cool thing when running the statistics here in comparison is that instead of the source and the authority and the hub being three separate people, they collapse. Two of them collapse under Pushuken and Imdi Ilum. These two people that I talked about earlier in their family trees, one being the wealthy creditor, the other one being the main center of trade. So it gives us a way now of like comparing networks that we've never dared ever do before. Comparing Sumerian were three administrative network with this long distance trade network in Oshur. Well, that's risky business but at least in this way we can do it from a kind of sound methodology that's been laid forth while still questioning assumptions and interpretations all the while but it's a structural scaffolding that allows us to kind of see, can we follow this? Can we equate an apple and an orange? What properties do they have similar? Well, their statistic properties are kind of, it's there either they're connected or they're not connected. That's binary. I mean, you can apply a weight to it but this gives us a way to compare something, the context of which is huge, 22,000 nodes versus Draeum's 1,000. Then jumping into, say, Ebbla and the Ebbla archive that has been reconstructed and the different shapes that this is taking has to do with the text typologies. This is focused more on the texts themselves, textiles and pots and pans and utensils and the different, so there's kind of this like a leveling effect that takes place because you do have to atomize it all but because it all takes place within the nodes list and edge list in the background, there's no distance between you and your data at any point. Like you get to be the one who's curating it. On the back end and playing with it and coloring it on the front end. So that's really, I think, a helpful tool, especially since a lot of archeology is done in the privacy of your own office. And yes, these files are easy to share as well and that's the nice thing. Like this isn't my work. This is coming from Italian or a seriologist, Massimo Maoki who works with the database and is interested in analyzing it for different kind of structural properties but is more of a text person. So in the end, like that's really, I think what this and other tools like network analysis and text analysis can do is start to build bridges between archeologists who work with only with bones and strontium values and philologists who only work with tablets and neither the twain shall ever meet at the same conference even. Unless you can find some relevant way of bringing these two together and then all of a sudden both of your data sets have taken on an additional dimension. We're adding new dimensionality to this. So that's kind of the argument I make for these types of tools. And I think that if you're looking for more dimensions to your work, it's a great way to go about it in a transparent way. One that you're not ending up with like some black box results at the end but rather something you can control to the nth degree. Yeah, sure. My pleasure. Yeah, I'm happy to. Yeah, it's called Gefi. You can see it right there, G-E-P-H-I. It's a dot org. And so it works on all the different types of computers. Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah.  Is that because of what you learned from doing your textual connectivity analysis that you could actually pinpoint room blocks or something like that? Do you work backwards? I work backwards. It's working backwards to the archeology. So there were a couple of, so the early archeologists who came to the site started it in the place that was looted. So they saw, ah, this is clearly where the tablets have been coming out of the ground. Why don't we just start here? And so that's how, in the very initial report in 1948, it's one of the best actually that they've ever done, unfortunately. Or fortunately, I mean, you know. And there they were very clear about like what few additional texts can they, then from that first season they pulled. I didn't call it an lawsuit. That's right. And then it's clear this is the same household because of the continuation of an event like a lawsuit that's unfolding. And then we'll have additional, like records or contracts from that lawsuit that correspond to the thousand or maybe fewer that we have on provenance. And then circular way back. Yeah. And yeah, it's just like backwards engineering. Can we find it this way? In a lot of cases you can. And like that's one of the problems is that for the old Assyrian stuff, there's a lot floating out here, out around here that is not connected at all to anything. And that will be, that's a continual project, but the fact remains of the 30,000 texts that have now come from this site, there's more that they could find each season. Like they're not done with pulling tablets out of the ground. So it could very well be that this chunk over here has just not been excavated yet. And though the names that are in there are unique to us now, but they'll become known to us as they continue to excavate. Or you know, they are unique names in which case like you can't do anything with that anyway because so Moans Larsen who edited one of these archives that was excavated in situ and with proper provenance and loci points. Turns out that within that archive, that local archive that his family used, there were other people who weren't related to the family that were depositing texts in there. And those people would sometimes put texts in without any names associated whatsoever. They were just commodities and receipts. Okay, well what do you do with the receipt that could be from somewhere else? Well, you do PXRF and you say where did the tablet come from maybe? Or you know, but you're limited at some point. So there's always gonna be a number of tablets that you're just gonna have to say, we think it came from here but we don't know where.  But then in these kinds of clusters and maybe typologies of tablets that we could then work with, there's like at least 40 types of tablets that they wrote here, 40 different types. And those are ranging from legal briefs, very formal legal briefs and business contracts all the way to personal notes and memos and rits of divorce and things like that. So it has a full range of the types of texts we could then say, okay, well, we've never found a writ of divorce in this place before but they all seem to be coming from over here at this like office where marriages and divorces take place. Yeah. The display, is it synchronic? Everything is slurred together. There it is. It moved through time because we didn't have a control rate anymore. That's right, yeah, it's a really good point. So within here, and especially for the dram texts, what we're working on, so we just started doing this network and the nice thing about the texts from DRAM, these 15,000 texts that we have from DRAM in Southern Mesopotamia Sumerian tablets is that each one has a date on it. So every tablet is dated. And sometimes to the day and the month and the week and the year, so you get all four and one and you're like perfect. I know just when it happened. So there is a way to do time sequence and there are simple ways and there are complex ways. The one of them will be like kind of a Boolean form in that you say like based on which year it displays certain parts of the network. Now it's always like incredibly easy to just create a new network, copy to new workspace. And there I've just sent this subset that I just randomly selected to a new place and now it's a subset of the network. So it's very easy from the huge kind of starting from everything together to then just piece off. No, I just want a year of it. Let me just take this year, let me control for that because maybe I want plus or minus five days and then I can make a network that way as well. So there's a lot of variability in terms of like what you see if that's like how you're working with the network in the visual here. Or you can just simply work with it in the data aspect of it behind the scenes and make your subsets there. But the nice thing is that there are a lot of plugins for Gefi and these are constantly being updated because it's open source software. So there's a lot of development going on for this tool and you can go through and see that they have a good documentation for each of these plugins here that allows you to look at scale parts of the graph with a scale factor, minimum spanning tree, calculate minimum spanning trees. You have, let's see, the ones that I think were from time I already installed. Let me see here. Yeah, I mean a lot of the, and they're all documented except for the standard ones. There's some really good descriptions about what these do. So the time span one, I'm forgetting the name of it, but it basically gives you this interval metric here. You see timestamp here and there's a timestamp and then there's an interval one so that you can give it a range and then it will display based on that interval if when you like do a filter. I mean, that's the other nice thing about this is that it has this really great, like you can filter on attributes or any kind of like dynamic variable. I'm gonna start clicking things and it's gonna crash because it is open source software. It's always a problem with demoing anything, but you can see that you can then like create an EU network very easily by just dropping that component in here and saying what the parameters of that network are within the depth of one, two, three or max. And you can do that with some K-core or an attribute. So let's say a year. So if you have within your dataset a column or an attribute called year, then you can filter very quickly based on that and export that filter to a new workspace. So it's really adaptive and interactive in that regard. So yeah, you're right. Like at the time it's kind of like you see it and it's all like, well, when is this taking place in time? Yeah, end space for that matter. There is this geo layout that allows you to graph it based on geo coordinates that you've put it in X and Y values. And it'll read those in as well if you've labeled your headers like X and Y or lat long. So they work really nicely in that regard with what I need for archeology. But yeah, it's like kind of getting the, getting filtering down to what you need is like, you know, kind of always the challenge for everything in my fields because you have so much data. Well, thanks again.


All right welcome back everybody. This is Michael, Laura and Krista here at the Nebraska Library Commission and welcome to session three of Big Talk from Small Libraries 2014. We're going to switch gears here a little bit and this session is entitled You Can Cue Using Cue Method to Understand Community Needs for Small Libraries. This is presented by Mary Jordan, an assistant professor at Simmons College GS LIS program. Prior to entering academia, she worked in a small public library as a director and administrator. Her research and consulting work now focuses on ways to help libraries to function better and serve the communities more effectively. Mary go ahead and take it away. Hi everybody. I'm really excited to be here. Thank you so much and I've definitely been enjoying the conference so far. So as I said that I am a former small public library person so I'm kind of familiar with some of the needs and the problems that small public libraries had and I know one of the issues that I constantly had was need to try to evaluate all of my services and evaluate what we were doing and try and find out what my community wanted but I didn't have well the time and I didn't have the expertise to make all of this happen. So I came into the idea of Cue Method and into the idea of academia in general as a way to sort of understand what I was doing here and how I could work with my libraries better. So when you're thinking about Cue Method it's just a strategy. It's just a tool that you could use to do those things to help evaluate your services to help find out what's going on in your community and to help sort of reach out to people. I'm going to let, if people want to jump in with questions, I think the organizers might be able to read them to me and I'm going to save time at the end for more questions but just thinking about yourselves and I'm sort of engineering you all right now. I don't know how many of you have tried to get about surveys in your library. Hands raised. Yes, I see you there. Good. And they work sometimes but I was always really frustrated with surveys because you asked those questions of well tell me on a scale of one to five how do you like our circulation or how do you like how quickly ILLs come in and everybody always said either five. They loved everything. Everything was great. Everything was wonderful which of course I love to hear but that's not necessarily helpful or they would say things like well we're angry about today and so we don't like anything. That's also not terribly helpful. So what Cue Method does is in fancy statistical language it lets you blend sort of qualitative and quantitative ideas and it lets you come out with some really impressive statistical ideas but it's honestly it's really easy and it's really fun for your patrons to do. It's something a little bit different and it's something that's going to encourage people to want to share their ideas with you which is always an issue but knowing that this is a nice reliable valid statistical methodology it gives you lots of really fancy data and cool numbers and things and that's something you can always share with your funders with your people in your community. It just it lets everybody know you know what you're doing. You're asking for things for more money for some program or you're asking for assistance in bringing in some other kind of equipment because you very clearly know that this is what your community members want. So I'm going to start off just by looking at what you get at the end of a Cue Method which is groupings of your respondents which I'm just going to say patrons because I'm going to assume that most of my Cue studies have been on library patrons and that's probably what yours will be too. So and I felt like this was this was probably a topic we could all kind of relate to. We're not academic librarians but we probably all know a little something about stress in libraries. So when I talked to and sent out Cue Methods to academic libraries from around the country they came up what I ended up with was three different groupings of people who were stressed out by different things in their workplace. So the first one is probably something many of us can relate to. It's just all these people everything that's constantly going on it's their family they have issues with their their home life that are bleeding over into work life they have issues with the people who are coming in they have issues that they don't have enough personal space they have issues with the students they have to work with it's just it's a lot and in this group of people these are the things that we discovered they were most stressed out about. Knowing this means then that you as you know an administrator as a manager you as a team member who's working to help solve this problem in your library you could take these answers and help build a program to design for these people. So the next group of people that the next group of people who had stressors the things that they were stressed out was kind of all the stuff that was happening at work. So that they had a lot of interruptions that their schedule shifted around a lot they had all these different deadlines to meet and that's what was stressing them out it wasn't the people it was kind of the administrative side of things and so again now we know libraries could take specific steps to solve that. And then our third group of people just my heart broke a little here but this is the people who were just stressed out about everything everything is upsetting that people are upsetting the administrative stuff is upsetting them the technologies it's just everything is hard for these folks and knowing that you have people in your organization who had this level of stress might lead you to more to larger steps that you could take to try and help them out so you know whether you refer them to an EAP or something else now you know. So now I'm not anticipating that you're going to necessarily look within your library to see what you guys are stressed out about although it's certainly a good study and I advocate it for everyone I have other public library studies that I've done that show different kinds of stressors and I'd be happy to talk with you later about that. But what I want to do now is now you sort of see how things are grouped in the end.  So now I want to kind of walk through the process of how do we set up a Q study. What what happens in Q? Because again if I ask sort of for a show of hands and everybody sitting at your desk or in your living room if everybody raises their hand who's heard of Q methodology no no yeah I see a distinct lack of hands up in the air right now. This is not surprising because I have this all the time because I talk about Q methodology a lot when I go places I talk about it with my students and and pretty much it's it's an unfamiliar process but I do think it's something it's easy it's fun we can do this as people who are small public librarians. So why would you and when your board asks you you have all of these things to do you are you have to do you know you have to do your programming you have to do reference you have to check books out you have to bring new stuff in you have to keep the doors open why would be trying to add more on to your plate well it's because it's always important for us to try and figure out what people need and what people want and it will be super if what our communities needed and wanted stayed the same and it never changed and from day to day and year to year it was always the same we would know how to help them then and that would be great I don't know if you're in a community like that but I I've never been so let's just assume that probably you're not either and that understanding your patrons and understanding your community which includes people who don't come to your library is going to be important in trying to make sure that you stay relevant to their lives and that you stay relevant and important in your role as public librarian so the time that you take to set aside for evaluation it's it should pay off for you so first of all you want to figure out what your evaluation need is so after we walk through this process I'm going to show you a study that I'm that I have finished looking at public libraries across the state of Illinois and then talk a little bit about a public study that I'm starting that might be relevant to you but in my study that I was at in Illinois what we wanted to know was what what do people want what do people in the community want from their public libraries so it might be things that they don't know we have it might be things that they definitely know we have but they're just not there maybe they're using them and they love them or they are we they know we have them but they don't care so that's your evaluation need and yours could be different and this could literally be anything so it could be looking at your stress your staff to see how stressed they are you can be looking at you know community needs you could be looking at specific groups of people so let's say you're interested in recruiting more seniors into your library so that would be your evaluation need or you want to bring in more five-year-olds to your library because they're always fun and so bring in these five-year-olds would be would be your evaluation need it can be anything anything relevant to you so then the next step that I have on here is to develop a set of ideas that are relevant to your topic so with a Q method you print out a little set of cards and each card has an idea so you have one idea on each card and then people will sort them in order from their most to least but all you have to do first is come up with your ideas this can be kind of tricky so you and your staff your community you know trusted patrons a board member more board members people that would have an interest in your topic ask them what kinds of things they think you might want to put in you want to try and hold it it can go to about 60 and still be valid but think for yourself if somebody handed you a set of 60 different cards and told you to sort them in order from one to 60 and you like most to think you like least it's tough so I try to hold it down to like 25 or 30 usually and you can go fewer than that if you'd like to so just come up with your ideas that are relevant and good and then find some people so now in my study in Illinois my people that we were recruiting was literally anyone I was looking just at people who were 18 and over but that was essentially my only criteria they didn't have to be library users they didn't have to love the library nothing they just had to be in the community and over the age of 18 but now again think about when I mentioned the study on senior citizens if you want to look at the services that you're offering for seniors then obviously you've defined yourself into a senior citizen category and so however you and your library want to define senior citizens is is is good so figure out who you want and then bring some people in it's not really difficult to do you could take this out on the road if you want to I've done this in a few diners I've done this in people's offices it's very simple you just have to have a little space to sort some cards and then your final step in getting ready is just to print out your cards and then worksheets I'm going to show you what a worksheet looks like in the next slide the cards are so easy because I don't have a lot of big technical skills either all you do is go to your go to the store and the business cards that you can get the print yourself that's what I use so print those out and on the front side each card has an idea and on the back side put a number so number one to 25 on your worksheet then you're going to give a place for people to record their answers but you also want to collect a few demographic questions now this is where when I'm talking about this in class my students start to freeze up a little bit and say demographics I don't know that's starting to sound like a hard word it's not no worries here all it is and you kind of want to have an idea of who you're talking to particularly if like my Illinois study that was anybody anybody over the age of 18 but I wanted to know kind of what their age ranges were so how many people are coming in who are you know 40 to 50 and then 51 to 60 how many people are coming in who regularly use the library you can ask them you know when was the last time you were in the library last week last month in the last year in the last five years do you have a library card if you have a gender identification some things that you're going to want to look at will you want to know about people who are interested in different kinds of languages or different kinds of services in your library that might be relevant to people who speak different languages at home so that would be good then to ask so what language do you speak at home all you want to do when you're thinking about the graphics is just figure out who it is that you're who it is that's answering your questions you don't have to collect their name that's not relevant it's not useful so it's not it's not personal it's not personally identifiable information just stuff that'll help you to identify who you have so you can make your results better for everybody so this is sorry a little bit blurred now this is kind of the ideal of what a Q sort process looks like so you could make something like this and print this out and people could lay their cards down in all these different little areas now I will tell you I don't know if this makes me a bad Q study researcher but I have never actually used one of these because it looks kind of it looks to me a little bit complicated it requires a little bit more explanation so I just make I just print out a word sheet and just have the numbers one through 25 printed out on there and then I just tell people to sort them and just lay them in a big line on their table or on the desk in front of us and then they flip each card over and I have a number on the back of the card so let's say whatever idea number nine was that that's what they think is absolutely the most important thing to have in the library so in the number one spot on the worksheet they write their answer is number nine I don't think it matters so much how you do it just as long as you make sure that they're that the answers are getting recorded in the order from stuff we like most to stuff we like least so this is how you actually do it all right now we've prepped we've looked at worksheet development so this is how you actually do a Q study this is your data collection so you have your person who comes in you might have a few people at the same time it's fine it either way works you give each person who comes in a set of cards so they have a whole set of your cards one through 25 and each card again has an idea on the front a number on the back and they get a set and they get a worksheet so you just you explain to them a little bit I'm looking for I'm looking I'm interested in fighting out you know what programs are most relevant to five year olds so could you or to parents of five year olds that might be easier uh do you go through and rank these for the thing that you like most to the thing that you like least now this is where your summary assurance comes in because I've had people kind of freak out a little bit here and they really they're so concerned about making it right making sure that uh it's exactly right that it's really they really want to make sure that it's good it's okay all they need to do is just sort so they can start off by maybe putting things into three piles so they have a pile of ideas that they know yeah definitely these these these are awesome I need these and they have a pile of uh no this is just not of any interest to me and they have a pile of I don't know maybe and then within those piles they can start to sort things out I always try to tell people too that what they would put down as card number one card number two yeah that's probably not wildly different and that's okay it doesn't have to be so don't worry too much about specific placement those numbers will be very those what you sort there what you have interest in very very most will be very different than a card that you would sort like into the tenth spot and it's probably very very different definitely very very different than a card that you would sort into like spot number 20 so don't worry so much about just strict perfection within the you know within your number of cards but get it close get in get in the ballpark and that's that's going to be fine now they don't have to absolutely love everything that you're giving to them maybe you want to find out what sort of programming would be good in your library and so you have you've given people 15 different potential programs that you could offer to see what they what they're interested in and somebody comes to you and says these are all just yucky I don't like any of these but well what do least eight could be number one and what do you most hate then would be number 15 or and this is a little more typical people say I love all of these I would love to have all of these come in well now this is where a cue method is I think really superior to those like art scales on a survey they can't say everything is exactly the same so maybe they discover that the technology petting zoo is pretty close to the baby goat petting zoo program that you want to bring in and you know now that they're thinking about it yeah maybe the square dancing program is down at the bottom it's still good they still love to do it square dancing in the library would be awesome but it's not it's not as good for them as the baby goat petting zoo and the technology petting zoo so I've had a few people who just really take a while it's okay just just kind of I always say in sort of a metaphorical way a pat pat you're fine everybody's good just keep going so you have them sort their cards in the order until they're happy with it and they say yes I'm happy this this is it and then they just flip the cards over and there's an each each idea has been given a number they put those numbers in order onto their worksheet and it's pretty simple so sometimes people they'll finish it all up on the hand and then they'll then they're excited well now what happens now what do you do or tell me what you were really trying to get at I always try to be sure people this there there was nothing excitingly hidden here it really was just the idea of it really was just that I wanted to know what sort of programs you're interested in or I want to know what sort of stress you're having that's all so you can if people are interested you can offer to you know make up a report that you could share them with your community include in your newsletter put up on your website something like that just so people understand where you where you went with the results that they gave to you all right now we have a huge pile of data in our hands and by huge pile of data I mean you probably have 30 worksheets in your hands 30 people came in hooray success so because this is fancy and statistical and all you go to the fun computer program now the one that I have been using is called pq method and I'm going to give you a site at the end for where this is found but I can just tell you now the website is called q method dot org no spaces or dashes or anything just the letter q method dot org so they have software on there that they have built it's a little clunky and by a little clunky I mean there might be tears but it it works out eventually and I'll show you at the end again I'm going to show you materials that you can use to set up your own q studies and I'll walk you through it so this is the one I've been using because it's free and because I'm although I've occasionally had a few tears over I'm familiar with it and I get it it works so it's fine there are other new programs though that are out as q method becomes a bigger methodology more people are interested in it so they're building other software that'll do this so q has actually been around for quite a while it's been around since the early 1900s William Stevenson a professor at University of Chicago in psychology was the one who developed this and it's so it's been there for a while but really one of the things that's always held the held it back or held it back for many years was it's an amazing amount of work to put together and so we had to really wait to get popular until computers could start doing all of this for us so there we're getting better too people are building better and better programs but when I say okay you type in all your data there and then magic happens I am technically a researcher and scholar and all those good things but I don't really understand how all of the statistics works it is essentially a factor analysis comparing the position of every single answer that every single person gives to the positioning of every other answer that every single other person gave I shorthand that is it's magic so but it works out it just they give you like 50 sheets of data 50 pages of data at the end and it's very cool it's very exciting and you look at it like I have stuff I really have something here again it's something that you can really show to your funders and you show your board and you say look see how see how worth it this was this is data we can rely on this is good data this is this was worth the time and the occasional tier it's good so in in all of these 50 pages of data you'll start you'll see groupings of people and it's these groupings that are kind of the the interesting part so they'll tell you well people who as we looked at with the stress study first of all here everybody who chose these five things as this was the most important thing to them this is this is the most this is the big thing this is what definitely affects their life that they're in a group and you you'll also find the people in that group the things that they didn't like the things that were not interesting to them that were not important to them of all of that we'll go into defining a group so when you finish this you might say oh well these are probably things that I knew about my patrons I don't anticipate most of you when you do Q studies will have enormous surprises because you know your patrons I mean you know the people who come in and especially or even when you're looking at studies that are that you're looking at outside of your patrons you know you're looking at people in the community who don't use the library I mean you still probably know them I mean I have spent most of my lives in small communities and even if we're not on first name basis I kind of have a gist of other people so you're not going to find tremendously surprising things necessarily although you might find some some groupings that surprise you or some groupings that you hadn't necessarily thought of in this way so it'll help you to understand what it is that people want from you what it is that people like what it is that is making people happy in their different ways that they're relating to your library so I got started in Q method I had done a couple of small studies but I did this large study in Illinois and if anybody is out there from an Illinois public library and they have stopped off in your library a few years ago and it was this was a really interesting and for me very fun project so the former Lewis and Clark library system in Illinois which sadly is is no more but they the director there and then a couple of their staff were really interested in trying to figure out what what do we want what we're thinking about the future we're planning for the future we have things kind of ready to go but what what do our people what do our there are the people that our library serve what do they actually want we don't want to just guess because that we can make mistakes and we could really you know we can guess and decide everyone wants Kindles and you're an iPad community everyone uses apples no one will touch your Kindle I mean you've just wasted a whole lot of money and a whole lot of time so that's what we wanted to avoid we also wanted to give people as libraries we're starting to think about strategic plans and several of their libraries in this system and across the state too I think but it specifically in the system we're thinking about their their strategic plans and so we wanted they wanted as a system to be able to provide some guidance to the libraries as you're planning for your for your future as you're writing your strategic plan for the next you know three years five years what what should we be what should you be putting in what should you be sort of aiming yourself toward even knowing you're not there this year you're not there next year but five years down the road where do we want to be so we wanted to ask people it seems so simple now doesn't hit in retrospect but it actually took a while to get to that so I traveled around the state and stopped in the some libraries and libraries helps me find people in their community and it was just for me it was a fantastic experience and we found three groupings of library users now again I doubt any of these are going to be amazingly shocking to you but it was still it was useful to have this kind of information it was useful to be able to sort of boil it all down to just these three groups that we were really looking at so these were libraries that were small rural libraries but also some of the larger we didn't go to Chicago public but we did go to some of the large libraries outside of Chicago so it was a real cross-section and that I think I mean that gave us the answers that were good kind of an above view of Illinois but I'm going to talk later about my study coming up where I'm trying to make this a little finer so completely unsurprisingly this was the first group that came up and it wasn't necessarily the most populated the largest group but it was the first one that popped up in the data and certainly no one no one was stunned by this people are just happy they just like the library they come in they have books they have magazines some of them say they like the coffee that's fun and that's it they're happy they're they're not really interested in more although several and these library people library users tended to skew toward the older age ranges and they said though and several of them were saying to me I know things like email and Facebook and all that are out there that was that was something that they could choose I'm not interested in it but I know my neighbors are I know my grandkids are so we wanted them to just focus on them specifically what are you interested in so it was interesting I think several people in this group said I know it's not for me but thinking about it you might include it so then our next group was information innovation oh and a question that I have to get is where do these names come from we thought of these names so you get to name your group whatever you think is going to be descriptive and if you want to name it a fun name go ahead and do that but that it does not come up in your statistic data that that comes from you so we called the second group the information innovation group so these were people who wanted new things they liked they like the books they like the computers they like the programs that were there but what else could we do what what was new what was exciting so we had several different programs that were in this list of choices that people could use and these people tended to go for all of those they tended to go for everything that that was technology so this group one of the things that they were interested in was potentially seeing podcasts recorded in the library that would be fun for them you guys of course are already on board here because you've got the webinar and I know this day library of Nebraska has been very popular very innovative in doing a lot of this kind of online training other places have so you probably are already familiar with idea of this kind of innovation but patrons are saying they want that too so this might be something that you want then to bring it back to your library they also wanted to things that they were interested in is not just the technology but being able to focus it in on themselves and being able to kind of bring things the way they wanted it so less group instruction and more individual more instruction that they could do on their own outside of the library it was they were they liked stuff that we did and they wanted to make it theirs so this third group we were a little surprised to see this although now again this has been a few years since the study was done and I'm less surprised now that this is up but this was one of the first studies that I had seen showing that people come to the libraries and they're not there for the books and they're not there for the computers but they are there just for the stuff so they're there for the cultural programming they're there for art lessons they're there to work on we didn't have maker spaces and 3d printers when this study was done several years ago but increasingly now that's something that you might extrapolate from this so they're there to do fun things this doesn't mean wildly expensive things I would be really excited if I could get a 3d printer to put in my office I would love that but I don't have the funds for that a lot of small libraries don't have the funds for things like that right now although you guys might be considering doing more expensive things sort of as a as as library systems or joining with other libraries but people who are interested in the service library programming they were also actually interested in the library like providing classes excuse me classes for them and things a couple of people this wasn't part of our study but a couple of people mentioned that they liked to come to the library and net and that they would have liked it if the library had had like a little knitting group I mean that's something that would be easy and I know I've seen libraries who do that so something like that might be what you want to bring into your library and to make sure that you are you're kind of reaching out to the people who are there for that idea of the library is the third space your first base is your home we spend a lot of time your second space is your work we spend too much time and then your third space is where you're going for fun and I don't know if you've read the book or seen the book called bowling alone I do not remember the author off the top of my head but bowling alone you guys are librarians you can find it and he talked about this several years ago about the idea that you know people used to go down and hang out at the bar on the corner or people used to join bowling leagues and there's less of that now because we have different ways to communicate in different ways to be but people still want that personal connection and a library can be a place to provide that kind of personal connection so where is all of this going then excuse me so I'm interested now in taking that study and the the knowledge that I got from that and trying to focus it a little bit more so what I'd like to be doing and I'm I'm beginning the process of this now so if you're alive that I may have already contacted looking for help and support on this thank you and if you're not I may still get to you I'm just just beginning this right now but what I want to do is look at similar kinds of ideas to what was in this study but look specifically at the large urban libraries what do people want from them and then very specifically step away from that and look at small libraries look at rural libraries and the day I think these two populations are going to have very different patron needs but I do actually anticipate overall people pretty much want the same things from libraries so I want to see what the specific differences are what kind of differences in abilities to provide things what kind of differences in what our patrons want what they will be but I am interested too in just what makes us we're all public libraries and what makes this all public libraries so it's building on this study but trying to expand it so I'm starting the recruiting process now for libraries in each one of these categories and if you're interested in participating this could be a way for you to sort of start off with a Q study because I'll be doing the Q study and then you could just you'll see how it how it's done you could sort of adapt it for yourself and do other Q studies in your library you'll have it forever it's always for you and if you're not interested obviously that's fine too right now I'm just again at the beginning kind of stages of thinking about things and putting ideas together so I've been talking to librarians in both large libraries and then in small libraries and trying to get a sense of what are the things that they do that they think are most important so this slide right here is about 45 items I this isn't this isn't the end this is just I'm probably going to add some more to this and then start trying to refine this down a little bit and trying to make sure that I'm not asking people so many things that it starts to be confusing for them or it starts to it starts to be lack a lot of meaning so the groups that we get are sort of mushy I don't want that I wanted to be good I want this to be something useful so what I did with the study in Illinois is each committee that we visited I wrote a final report we provided the report on that community and then with the information also in compared to the rest of the state and that would that report we gave to the library directors and we also sent copies to the mayors of each community so that the mayor again kind of had that sense of libraries important libraries are vibrant things are happening in libraries and that's always such such an important thing and I think small libraries have that easier and harder in some ways both than than the larger libraries easier because you probably know your mayor you probably are you're acquainted you've been around each other it's easy to bump into each other that kind of access can be very very useful very valuable harder in that you know your mayor you guys have easy access to each other and I know I've been in situations and helped work with librarians and other in situations where that was not a good thing where maybe you know the it was a very strange relationship and that makes it harder the way around each other if you had a little more distance it might be better but regardless I'm very interested always in the idea of advocacy so I always want to do these studies and find out this information for librarians not just because it's fun and not just because it's interesting and not just because we might change a couple of things that we do but really because I want us to be reaching out and I want us to be you know talking to other people everywhere I travel around the country a lot and I visit a lot of libraries and I very truthfully I'm stunned constantly stunned by how great libraries are even I mean the very smallest libraries I've been to the very smallest communities where it's one person who volunteers three hours a day three days a week and that's the library still they're doing just really neat amazing things and I want to make sure that we're telling other people how neat amazing and wonderful we are so using a Q method is a way to not only have fantastic data that you could take out and you could share and give to other people but also to help just you sort of connect with the people in your community and say oh yeah did you remember we do this we do this we do this we are just this awesome you should come see us so this is obviously just sort of a quick overview of some work that I've done with Q potential work that you might want to do with Q and a quick overview is not not necessarily enough here to kind of get you started and help you to feel comfortable so the blurry book over here on the right I'm pointing at the green one this it says Q methodology and I actually have a copy of the book right here in my hand too this is written by Bruce McKeon and excuse me Dan Thomas and so it's part of a series called quantitative applications in the social sciences there this is book number 66 there are a whole bunch of these little green books and they're nice they're very useful they're from sage and they're they're good I find this a little complicated and until now though it's really been until recently it's been the book though that everybody used so last year this book on the left doing Q methodological resource research rather came out and so I'm actually still waiting for my copy to be delivered Amazon had a big run on them but this just looks fantastic and so I've looked through it and it looks very good very useful and I think it'll help to sort of break the process down a little bit more so that you do feel comfortable you do feel like even if you don't have a really intense statistical background even if you don't have a statistical background I really have almost no math skills don't don't tell everybody else I'll be embarrassed but I my math is terrible and I can do Q method it's it's something that's very doable and so it's something I think that can really be very useful to us so this is the website that I mentioned earlier called qmethod.org so this is where the Q community hangs out this is where everybody gets together people in a lot of disciplines come there they all their papers are put up there different software that people are building to help interpret your Q data are there there's a good listserv where people are talking about things sometimes they're talking about stuff that's really complicated and I don't understand it but often though they're asking questions and they're bringing up ideas of things that that were really useful to me so these are the places that I would start for you as you're thinking about ways that you could evaluate ways that you can look at your community in ways that you can bring in these new ideas to to your library and definitely what those should be me not not to push myself on you but I really enjoy working with the libraries to help set these kinds of things up so I said at the beginning of this discussion I was a public library director I it was my first job out of library school and when I talk about this I often say to my students I had no idea what I was doing I really I was so lost and I was so confused and I wanted to be better and I wanted to do better and I was really fortunate that I was in a good place that I got a lot of training that and that the people who were around me in my system in my state people that I knew from other places were supportive and were helpful and that that really helped to get me through so when I entered the academic side of the profession though I did this with kind of the thinking that I'm here to be the person who does the academic stuff who does the researchy stuff in public libraries specifically this is my area this is what I spent all my time talking about so that people who are doing the hard work of public libraries they don't have time but I do so we can partner together and we can work together so it's kind of a long way of saying I'm here this is my email address but you can always find me at Simmons College and again my slides and everything will be at the on this conference and I'll be really happy to talk with you whether you're hearing this live or whether you're hearing this tape later if you want to set up a Q project or any sort of project really but I'm specifically interested in Q today I'm really happy to talk with you and help work with you okay so that is all that I had to say and I wanted to leave a few minutes for questions all right thanks very this time if you want to go ahead and start trying to type in yep we will happily take questions for Mary view the q&a we already have got some queued up but please feel free to submit more we'll get to as many as we can and we have been recording this and we'll be posting everything post Laura so we have some questions from the audience okay we have one is there a difference between asking people to sort cards and just asking them to rank a list huh um I'm going to loosely say no and thinking that I understand exactly what you're saying the idea is just that they're going to rank an idea so they're sorting sorting ranking the sorting goes number one is my very best most favorite number two is slightly less most favorite than number one yeah um so in that sense same thing um another question have you done a study looking at the difference in perception of library needs between users non-users and uh staff more friends that was actually something that and that was beyond kind of the scope of what we're talking about today it was something that we did try to break out of this study so I did also then um not do a queue but I surveyed all the library staff across Illinois and then I also surveyed directors across the country to sort of compare from what the patrons said they wanted to what the library staff said that they wanted or that they and that they felt comfortable doing now and then what library directors across the country thought libraries kind of should be doing in general um they weren't the answers there weren't wildly different uh I think the patrons wanted more kind of hands on thing and the library people seem to be a little bit more interested in providing better materials but again this is a study that was a few five or six years old now so I think it may be different by now I think we may all be thinking more along the lines of service okay um another question can you include blank cards for the patron or user to fill out to add to the stack no that's a question and I should have thought to say that no you can't because you need to sort what you have there so what I do and I always do this and I did in this study is on their worksheet I say what else do you like so for example one thing that none of us thought of and I I can't imagine what we were doing but when we put our cards together no one thought about including homeschool services and so several homeschool parents were part of our study and I had one woman who wrote the she covered the entire front of the worksheet the back of the sheet and I gave her two more pieces of paper and she had so many ideas to share so that you bring in other ideas but in just your sort you need to identify and define every card okay okay we have several questions and I'm going to try to kind of put them all together in one the essence of it seems to be how do you find the people out in the community or the people who don't come into the library to query them how do you get people to participate sure oh and this is always the challenging thing so this is being that I will say in my study I don't think we did as well as I had planned it to happen what I am planning now now that I'm more experienced in Q and know more about what I'm doing is actually trying to contact community organizations so try to contact like the lions contact a Spanish center that you might have in your community different organizations I know people will be and ask them if I could come there and do some of these studies with their people who may not be library or I'm sorry may not be library users other things that I have seen people do and I think this would actually be great and this thing again be something that would be simpler in a smaller community than in a large urban area where people don't know you is try to set up a desk the hardware store on a Saturday and see if you know as people are coming out of the hardware store could you take a few minutes we'll give you a library pencil if you fill out a Q study for us it doesn't take very long to do this it really even sorting a bunch of cards only takes about 10 minutes so going to a hardware store going to a grocery grocery store someplace that's kind of outside your usual route and it's a little difficult it's a little intimidating didn't go ask people but most people are probably interested okay um we have a question have you tried an online version of this I have and again if you go to the method org they have online software that you can use I again didn't just because I always try to keep everything as simple as it possibly as I probably can so in fact the academic study that I showed you I did parallel studies and I did one online for academic librarians and then I did one traveled around to different academic libraries and actually visited them in person and the answers were just the same the the same kind of groupings came up in both ways so I've done it and I it's it's fine it works great I kind of like the hand-holding aspect I kind of like being able to sit there with people because while they're sorting you're chatting and you're talking about things and they may just come up with other ideas that they just want to share they may say wow yeah I never thought of this this is so cool so I don't think there's a bad way to go but just have a reason for why you're going online or in person okay and final question please um what is the name of that software that analyzes the information um right the one that I use is called the software that I've been using is called pq method letter p letter q method all one word and it's on the q method website it is clunky it is a little difficult to use and I think also on the web on the q method website there are other software programs that you can use that I think will probably be easier I've just kind of stuck with this because it's the one that I started with and it's the one that I know but you may want to start with another one and so they'll be available on the q website what kind of cost is involved most of them are free the one that I'm using the pq method is completely free which is certainly an excellent price for a poor academic but the other ones I I didn't buy this but a friend of mine bought a bought once a piece of software and I think it was like $25 these are things that people are just kind of putting together themselves so they're not there there is no large company that's making q method software and charging you Microsoft level prices okay all right well thank you very much right that is our time for this session of big talk from small libraries we have been recording and we will be posting all the recordings and slides post conference starting next week and Mary's email address there is for you on the screen if you have any additional questions unfortunately due to time we can't get to everybody's questions Mary thank you once again for that we really appreciate it we gave us a lot to think about


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Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Thomas Spink, president, CEO and co-founder of Hemastemix. Hello, Thomas. How are you doing? Good afternoon, Stephen. Very well. Thanks. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks. And you must be a very happy man today. You reported some very good news this morning, and while other companies are suffering in the markets, your stock at one point was up almost 15%. So let's talk about your news. Sure. Well, we announced today the final step in the litigation settlement agreement. We settled with our opponents, and this gives us back the intellectual property that is Hemastemix that was controlled by our opponents, including the clinical trial data, the randomization tables, which enable us to analyze the phase two clinical trial data. And all of our historical information that was originally at Hemastemix Israel, including the randomization table that governs the subjects that were treated in this clinical trial in South Africa. So it's actually a very, very significant day for Hemastemix and its shareholders. Yeah. And you probably don't know this about me. I'm a recovering lawyer. So when someone wins a lawsuit, I consider that a very big deal, and especially you are a medical technology company, and your intellectual property is everything. You can come up with the best process in the world, but if you don't own it, then you own nothing. So today's news release says that all of your intellectual property has been returned to Hemastemix, and now you have a way forward. Yes, exactly right. And to your point, this is a very significant intellectual property portfolio. It is governed by some 91 patents. What we do, Steven, is we take a cup of blood from the patient's arm, derive their stem cells from it in the space of five days, culture the patient's own stem cells in their blood serum, and we create three different stem cell lines, an angiogenic cell precursor that has been used to treat some 500 subjects, a neuronal cell precursor, and a heart cell precursor. The results that we have published are significant. We've demonstrated in a randomized clinical trial 20 patients where 10 received ACP and 10 received a placebo. After two years of follow-up, there were two deaths, and six of eight limbs lost to amputation in the placebo arm. There were no deaths, and seven of 10 limbs saved from amputation in the treated arm. And that parallels many of our published results in ischemic heart disease as well as COPD. Those are remarkable results, especially if someone's in danger of losing an arm or if they got cardiomyopathy or any of the sorts of things where the lack of blood flow is important to those people. That is wonderful news going forward. And again, today's news is that you own all of that now, and you can continue to develop without your shareholders worrying that someone else is going to steal your technology. Indeed, yes. And so we have quite a task ahead of us. It's not for the faint of heart, but I think when you compare our valuation with our peers, I think it's still a very good entry point for anyone who has appetite for biotech risk capital. Now that you've got the intellectual property issues cleared out of the way, what's next for you, Ms. Nevers? So we will complete the analysis of the Phase 2 clinical trial and I predict announce a Phase 3 clinical trial as we have sufficient evidence in the preliminary data and in the other published data that the product is safe. And as you know, that's really the point of a Phase 2 clinical trial. Phase 3, you really want to demonstrate that it's not only safe, but also efficacious. We believe that, again, that the historical clinical data we have published is very indicative of the future for human stemming. And where were the clinical trials taking place? This was as the current Phase 2 clinical trial was in 17 teaching hospitals across North America, some well, regarded institutions such as U of T, UBC here in Canada, Florida, Shands as another example. No, well, and now you've cleared the path moving forward and I suspect you're going to be a very popular man in terms of the markets as well, especially in these days when everyone is struggling a little bit, you definitely are standing out today. Yes, yes. No, today is a standout day and we're delighted. Well, it's great. Well, thank you, Thomas. I look forward to chatting again soon and hear how your clinical trials are going. And please come back and update us. I'm sure that our viewers want to follow what's going on now that you've cleared the decks for action. Thank you very much, Stephen. Pleasure to speak with you.