The Digital Humanities Workshop
presents
A Generous Interface for the Discoverability of Text Collections
Tuesday, April 4th, 5:00 - 6:00 pm
The Nexus, Hayden Library (14S-130), MIT Libraries:
https://whereis.mit.edu/?go=14
Jeffrey Shen
(Graduate Research Assistant at the Digital Humanities Lab & Master's in Engineering student, MIT) presents "A Generous Interface for the Discoverability of Text Collections," Tuesday, April 4, 5-6pm, in The Nexus.
From the presenter: "Existing search interfaces for digital collections are excellent for finding specific items, but are unfriendly to inexperienced users, fail to facilitate exploration,
and do not highlight the internal relationships and structures within a collection. Generous interfaces have been theorized as an alternative to search-centric information retrieval, and have begun to be implemented in a limited number of digital cultural
institutions. However, there are almost no examples of generous interfaces for text-based collections, a significant omission. In this thesis, I develop an experimental interface to explore MIT’s DSpace collection, which contains the full-text of over 50,000
theses published by MIT affiliates: a “spatial search” where content is mapped onto a two-dimensional virtual space that enables users to search by “moving” rather than through queries. I then use an experiment user setup to evaluate the interface against
a traditional search interface."
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the
Digital Humanities Workshop provides a flexible, dynamic space for faculty and researchers to connect with one another about digital research and teaching topics.
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Ece (pronounced AJ) Turnator
Pronouns: she, her, hers
Humanities and Digital Scholarship Librarian
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MIT Libraries
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