Desiderata for Exploratory Search Interfaces to Web Archives in Support of Scholarly Activities
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Date
2016-06
Authors
Jackson, Andrew
Lin, Jimmy
Milligan, Ian
Ruest, Nick
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Abstract
Web archiving initiatives around the world capture ephemeral web content to preserve our collective digital memory. In this paper, we describe initial experiences in providing an exploratory search interface to web archives for humanities scholars and social scientists. We describe our initial implementation and discuss our findings in terms of desiderata for such a system. It is clear that the standard organization of a search engine results page (SERP), consisting of an ordered list of hits, is inadequate to support the needs of scholars. Shneiderman's mantra for visual information seeking ("overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand") provides a nice organizing principle for interface design, to which we propose an addendum: "Make everything transparent". We elaborate on this by highlighting the importance of the temporal dimension of web pages as well as issues surrounding metadata and veracity.
Description
© ACM, 2016. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in JCDL '16 Proceedings of the 16th ACM/IEEE-CS on Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2016 https://doi.org/10.1145/2910896.2910912
Keywords
Faceted browsing, Metadata search interfaces, Shneiderman's mantra, Veracity