With so many contradicting media articles citing research, knowing what to believe can be frustrating for everyday media consumers. Without diving into academic text themselves, it can be quite the challenge for consumers to know if the appropriate level of authority to attribute to the research cited (is the journal being cited well-respected? Are the findings controversial? Do similar studies exist with different results?). The particular factors which influence the amount of coverage academic research receives from journalists are not well understood, which further complicates the situation. We have gathered and analyzed descriptive data about media articles and the academic works they cite to help us understand what sort of research receives attention from journalists. Through this research we hope to give consumers a better understanding of the relationship between journalism and academic research, and thereby enable them to create more informed interpretations of information they encounter in media.

Video games are widely consumed as interactive media by a diverse population. 49% of US adults reportedly play video games and the US industry alone is estimated to be worth over $23 billion. However, who gets represented in video games is poorly understood and public discussions on the topic are divisive and heavily anecdotal. Controversies like Gamergate demonstrate a lack of depth, rigor, and scope in discourse on diversity in gaming across stakeholders including academics, consumers, developers, and publishers. Our team identified and built solutions to address the two largest barriers to the study of representation in gaming: a standard way to describe video game protagonists and a representative sample of video games. Released in a public-friendly format in collaboration with key stakeholders (e.g., the GAMER group, Anita Sarkeesian), these materials enable the systematic study of representation we need to advance crucial dialogues about our fastest growing media.

With the current number of political news sources and media outlets available, trying to stay up to date with politics can be quite overwhelming. Whether it be contradictory views or media bias, the political news landscape is becoming more complex and oversaturated. Many of these news sources can be dense and hard to navigate, making finding the content you actually want a daunting task. Vantage is a political news aggregation engine that simplifies the process of discovering, reading, and internalizing the latest news from the most popular political news sources. Our solution combines multiple news sources into a single consolidated news feed, making it quick and easy for users to navigate the potential bias of any one news source. Vantage makes consuming political news quick and effortless so that readers spend more time learning and less time searching.

The data captured in historic ships' logbooks represent one of the world's deepest untapped reservoirs of meteorological, historical, and environmental information. Logbooks from nineteenth-century Arctic exploring vessels, with their meticulous recordings of weather, sea ice extent, and species range, can support climate reanalysis models and provide a biogeographic and historical atlas of the Arctic past. Since 2012, citizen scientists at Old Weather (oldweather.org) have transcribed more than 100,000 scanned logbook pages from historic Arctic ships. In order to make this data discoverable and accessible, we built and populated an information structure for Old Weather's data—weather observations, ship positions, daily narratives, and associated manuscripts—and designed a pilot interface for exploration and display. For the first time, both researchers and the public have access to logbook scans, data, transcriptions, links to related materials, and full documentation of sources.

The universe of metadata standards is expansive, diverse, and continuously evolving. My project supported the creation of KAOS (Knowledge-Advancing Organization Systems), an online repository for metadata schemes and schemas of all forms, functions, and levels of complexity - including controlled vocabularies, thesauri, web ontologies, subject lists, classification schemes, indexing languages, descriptive frameworks, conceptual models, and more. After exploratory research into data ingest, storage, migration, transformation, analysis, and visualization, I designed, tested, and implemented a proof-of-concept infrastructure and workflow that lays the foundation for development to begin on a larger scale. When fully launched, the KAOS platform will use linked data to visually represent relationships among metadata standards and show changes in those standards over time. As a centralized access point to the wide world of metadata vocabularies, KAOS serves as a valuable resource for information professionals in any domain or industry.

Now more than ever, businesses have access to enormous data sets that include their customer transactions, demographic data and more. But simply storing the data does not mean the data is useful. How do organizations transform this data into a valuable business asset? Our project sponsor, Full Circle, the largest farm-to-customer organic produce and delivery service in the Pacific Northwest, asked us to develop a comprehensive assessment of customer retention by analyzing information available in their databases and marketing surveys. We used qualitative and quantitative research methods paired with design techniques to explore customer sentiment, analyze target audiences, identify independent variables significant to retention, and recommend prescriptive actions. Keeping customers is critical to the mission of Full Circle. Our analysis of customer purchasing behaviors and survey preferences led to actionable intelligence to improve customer retention by pinpointing how Full Circle better fulfill customer needs and expectations.

Space Needle, LLC is seeking a move to a greener and more efficient electronic billing, invoicing, and records sharing system within the organization, with ability to share outside the organization. The company was seeking a digital process and invoice approval system to convert manual entry and workflow procedures and replace the antiquated format and practices already in place. This Capstone investigated emerging industry technologies surrounding electronic receiving, invoicing, and workflow with particular consideration of processes in document management and department budgeting and approval. Project impact includes elimination of misplaced files or invoices, instant document retrieval and sharing across the company, and a fit with the company’s new Green Initiatives Mission.

With over 400 permanently sited artworks in their collection, the Office of Arts & Culture has advanced Seattle’s reputation as a cultural center for innovation and creativity. Increasing accessibility to this unique cultural collection introduces a new audience to the collective history of the artworks and the history of Seattle. One of the ways this has been achieved is by showcasing artworks on the Public Art Archive, a national online database of public artworks. By designing a digital curation of content from the collection, the artworks can be used for educational purposes, research, and artistic inspiration. The curation of art objects included preparation and organization into an established dataset. Each object entry includes information about location, description, artist statements, and images. Digital curation of this collection demonstrates how to provide a framework for collection accessibility while highlighting how the Office of Arts & Culture has invested in public art.

MuSee takes a unique approach to educational interactivity on mobile devices. MuSee uses augmented reality to create an immersive environment filled with multimedia content. This artifact scanner will connect users to new and interactive information about the artifacts at the museum. Augmented reality makes our product unique, easy to use, interactive and fun! MuSee also features custom content for the client museum including event information, exhibit details, accessibility information and a donation feature. MuSee is about telling a story, and the stories at museums are far too complex, colorful, and interesting to be confined solely to text. Most museums either lack mobile applications or have poor quality applications that fail to solve the issue of engaging visitors in an interactive manner. MuSee is revolutionizing the Burke Museum with an application that creates an augmented reality experience, allowing guests to engage and interact with history in ways they never believed were possible.