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Spatial Hypertext for Digital Library Users. George Buchanan, Ann Blandford, Matt Jones, Harold Thimbleby Interaction Design Centre Middlesex University London. History Lessons. Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat its mistakes Economics
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Spatial Hypertext for Digital Library Users George Buchanan, Ann Blandford, Matt Jones, Harold Thimbleby Interaction Design Centre Middlesex University London
History Lessons • Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat its mistakes Economics • Users don’t want to do any extra work • however, they are happy to get extra benefits “for free” • e.g. Amazon’s customer profiling
Information Seeking • Wider process than “vanilla” Information Retrieval • Information need formulation • Search formulation • “IR” • Document review and selection • Information need reformulation • Highly iterative / Internally complex
Spatial Hypertext • Direct manipulation • Document shown as a graphical item • Uses visual cues (e.g. colour. shape) to suggest a document’s role, type, age... • Articulates uncertain and/or provisional nature of document groupings • Documents can be grouped • By proximity etc. or by hierarchy
Spatial Hypertext “State of Play” • Positive outcomes to user studies • For supporting decision argumentation • For supporting information triage • Often loosely (if at all) connected to information systems • Search behaviours are poorly defined • Hard versus soft behaviours not well understood
Spatial Parsing • Introduced by Shipman in 1995 • Not a lexical parser • Lexical = fixed syntax->extract words from a stream->find semantics • Spatial = unknown syntax->extract patterns from a space->process patterns to find semantics
Garnet • Spatial Hypertext for Digital Libraries • Connects to the Greenstone DL using the Greenstone/CORBA protocol • Similar to VIKI
GarnetSpatial Parsing • Currently has a simple (proximity) spatial parser • Connects to a clustering system • Gives a cluster profile for every pattern found • Incoherent patterns are ignored • Small patterns are ignored • Double-click on label = open in browser
GarnetSpatial Parsing • A search result can be “scattered” • Placing search result labels next to groups of similar documents • A document may appear next to no, one or many groups • Search result list appears as usual • Using user organisation of material to predict the role of future candidate documents
Garnet - Search • You can drag from search results to workspace • Items can be deleted from search results • Keeps a history
Garnet - User Issues • Common metaphors seem inconsistent • e.g. “deleting” a document; blacklisting versus returning • User control versus automatic action • Scattering • Is it useful? Is the quality right? • representation of certainty • positioning
Conclusion • A lot of work to be done • Far more questions than answers • User evaluation needed • Speed/space concerns with spatial parser