Jeffrey Shen (Graduate Research Assistant, Digital Humanities Lab, MIT) presents "A Generous Interface for the Discoverability of Text Collections," Tuesday April 4, 5 - 6 pm, in The Nexus.

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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Hosted by the MIT Libraries and Programs in Digital Humanities, the Digital Humanities Workshop provides a flexible, dynamic space for faculty and researchers to connect with each other about digital research and teaching topics.

All MIT community members are welcome. Non-MIT guests and guests without an MIT ID should RSVP to digitalhumanities@mit.edu.