One Butterfly

About Me

My name is Eryn Whitworth and I see digital collections as a bridge for people to interact with media across physical and digital repositories. I attend the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Whilst at UT I have studied visual information retrieval, information architecture, information design, and user centered design movement. The "One Butterfly" project is the culmination of my work in graduate school. My desire to work on a project like this began five years ago while attending college in Oklahoma.

My interest in building bridges to the arts and culture led participate in the Smithsonain's Intern Program over the Summer of 2008. I interned with the Information Resources department of the American Art Archive in Washington D.C. While at the Smithsonian I learned of the Cross Catalog Search Center (CCS). The purpose of the One Butterfly project is to produce three user interface designs for the CCS. Since, the catalog itself will take some time to mature I seek to design an interface that supports interactions made possible by future technologies like consumer grade multi-touch computer screens.

The CCS is a good fit for my particular interests because it is a large public institution poised to implement a large scale project to introduce their collections to the American public. The One Butterfly project and my involvement with the CCS are the first step toward my goal to research the interface of digital collections of cultural objects.