Article: "My Evidence: Who's the Authority Here?"

http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/robinson/robinson.html

This paper discusses a project called My Evidence, funded by San Francisco's Exploratorium. The project allows people to explore their own belief systems, by examining the ways we know what we know, and the ways that we choose what to believe. This online program poses statements of belief and asks the user to choose which statements they believe in the most, and how they acquired the belief that the statements are accurate. With this information, a personalized visual evidence map is created for the user, and this map can be compared with the maps of other users. People can see the ways of collecting evidence that they believe are the most effective and accurate and compare this with the ways that they themselves normally collect evidence.

The issue of belief systems and the collecting of evidence is very important today as a result of the massive amounts of supposedly "scientific" information and data available currently on the web. Many websites from which people gather the "evidence" fueling their beliefs are seen as credible authorities on a given subject, but these sites may have been created by anyone, and do not provide sources or any real, documented facts. For this reason, it is important for us to attempt to understand the ways in which people gather what they perceive to be factual information, and build belief systems based on this information.

This article is also pertinent to some of the themes we've been discussing in class, as it describes changes made in the program over time in order to increase accessibility and personalization, making it more available and relevant to people's lives. This is one challenge constantly faced by organizations, especially museums, in presenting information on the web.