Drilling for Papers in INKE

In this article, we discuss the first year research plan for the INKE interface design team, which focuses on a prototype for chaining. Interpretable as a subclass of Unsworth’s scholarly primitive of “discovering”, “chaining” is the process of beginning with an exemplary article, then finding the articles that it cites, the articles they cite, and so on until the reader begins to get a feel for the terrain. The chaining strategy is of particular utility for scholars working in new areas, either through doing background work for interdisciplinary interests or else by pursuing a subtopic in a domain that generates a paper storm of publications every year. In our prototype project, we plan to produce a system that accepts a seed article, tunnels through a number of levels of citation, and generates a summary report listing the most frequent authors and articles. One of the innovative features of this prototype is its use of the experimental “oil and water” interface effect, which uses text animation to provide the user with a sense of the underlying process

Designing a semantically rich visual interface for cultural digital libraries using the UNEsCO multilingual thesaurus

This paper reports on the design of a visual user interface for the UNESCO digital portal. The interface makes use of the UNESCO multilingual thesaurus to provide visualized views of terms and their relationships and the way in which spaces associated with the thesaurus, the query and the results can be integrated into a single user interface

Showcase Browsing with Texttiles 2.0 and BubbleLines

In this article, we argue that it is possible to effectively expand interactions with a subset of a collection of text files by using an online interface based on rich-prospect browsing principles, coupled with task-specific visualization tools. In this context, we will present the revisions carried out to create the next iteration of the Texttiles browser, based on results from a user study in 2009. These changes have produced a much more flexible platform for showcasing significant items in text collections, based on user selections of display details, arrangement of items into groups, and annotation marks. In addition, we introduce BubbleLines, an interactive visualization that sits on the Texttiles 2.0 Application Programming Interface (API) and allows users to see search results across multiple documents simultaneously

Designing a Semantically Rich Visual Iinterface for Cultural Digital Libraries Using the UNESCO Multilingual Thesaurus

This paper reports on the design of a visual user interface for the UNESCO digital portal. The interface makes use of the UNESCO multilingual thesaurus to provide visualized views of terms and their relationships and the way in which spaces associated with the thesaurus, the query and the results can be integrated into a single user interface.\u

Citation rhetoric examined

In his influential monograph «The Rhetoric of Citation Systems», Connors (1999) elaborates on the principle that scholars working with different forms of citation find themselves thinking differently, since the citation format has natural consequences in the way it interacts with the material in the practice of the writer. [...

Interfacing the Collection

The digital age has led to the advent of electronic collections with millions or even billions of items. This paper examines the types of interfaces that are emerging for large-scale collections, specifically addressing what a large collection looks like online and how it can be managed by users.  In examining these questions, we propose some features that we feel are universally desirable in interfaces to collections.  Overall, there appear to be two sets of features that help users effectively use and sort online content: tools to view, organize and navigate collections; and tools to customize and manage user-created sub-collections

The Face of Interface: Studying Interface to the Scholarly Corpus and Edition

How can we study the interface of scholarly knowledge across print and digital epochs? To ask about interface across epochs is to take a concept that makes sense in the digital world and anachronistically bring it to bear on print in a way that could confuse both. Nonetheless we need to develop ways of thinking about the relationship between design, knowledge and audience across media, and to do that we find ourselves remediating concepts like interface. This paper takes the category of interface and adapts it to studying the design of the corpus and edition

A Short History and Demonstration of the Dynamic Table of Contexts

This paper presents a brief account of the form and function of the “table of contents” to establish a theoretical framework for understanding the form and function of this common element of book architecture with the aim of informing the development of a dynamic table of contexts for books and reading in the digital medium. This paper will thus theorize the relationship between textual studies and interface design in INKE, a project for Implementing New Knowledge Environments

Implementing New Knowledge Environments: Year One Research Foundations

In this 2009 article, we present details of the first year work of the INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) research group, a large international, interdisciplinary research team studying reading and texts, both digital and printed. The INKE team is comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefronts of fields relating to textual studies, user experience, interface design, and information management. We aim to contribute to the development of new digital information and knowledge environments that build on past textual practices. We discuss our research questions, methods, aims and research objectives, the rationale behind our work and its expected significance—specifically as it pertains to our first year goals of laying a research foundation for this endeavour.&nbsp

From Crud to Cream: Imagining a Rich Scholarly Repository Interface

  This article addresses the design of a dynamic repository interface to support numerous scholarly activities. Starting with the four fundamental functions associated with persistent storage — create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) — we tested, as an organizing rubric for the interface, the acronym CREAM: Create (represent, illustrate); Read (sample, read); Enhance (refer, annotate, process); Analyze (search, select, visualize, mine, cluster); and Manage (track, label, transform). Based on a card-sorting exercise conducted with researchers, we conclude that a slightly modified rubric of CREAMS offers a useful starting point that emphasizes the enriched functionality a scholarly repository or similarly complex digital environment requires, as well as the immense challenge of designing conceptually clear interfaces, even for a relatively homogenous community of researchers