Author: kacsuk

Following the success of our project launching workshop in July 2019, the work on processing community databases started in earnest (you can read about the technical details of the process in relation to ontology creation and data transformation). By November 2019, we were ready to start examining the data and our infrastructure through the lens of exploratory research.

We decided to adopt the Tiny Use Case workflow methodology to have a number of short-term research projects that would be substantial enough to generate meaningful and interesting results in their own right, but would be compact enough to provide an ongoing stream of feedback on issues with the database, the project infrastructure, and researcher needs. Since each Tiny Use Case is only 3-4 months long, it provides us with an excellent tool for assessing our progress and for uncovering newer issues, as each TUC has a different focus and somewhat different requirements.

continue reading

The term Tiny Use Case, or TUC for short, was coined by the diggr (Databased Infrastructure for Global Games Culture Research) research project team. A detailed description of this workflow methodology can be found in their paper With small steps to the big picture: A method and tool negotiation workflow (Freybe, Rämisch and Hoffmann 2019).

Taking their inspiration from agile software development principles, the Tiny Use Case workflow was created to handle the needs of a complex research project that required the meshing of expertise from very different disciplinary backgrounds and involved a high level of uncertainty regarding the types of challenges that would emerge in the course of the project. By working through a series of three to four month long Tiny Use Cases the diggr team was able to leverage a similar cycle of continuous incremental innovations and assessments that is one of the main strengths of agile approaches.

Continue Reading