Visual Interface Design for Digital Cultural Heritage: A Guide to Rich‐prospect Browsing

Citation

Sanderson, K. (2012), "Visual Interface Design for Digital Cultural Heritage: A Guide to Rich‐prospect Browsing", The Electronic Library, Vol. 30 No. 1, pp. 150-151. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640471211204150

Prospect is a concept first articulated in the context of landscape painting where it was used to theorise about the aesthetic appeal of paintings which suggest unimpeded opportunities to survey the landscape or for way‐finding. Affordances are properties of an object or of the environment which, when perceived, provide an opportunity for action. Ruecker, Radzikowska, and Sinclair draw on these two concepts to develop a theoretical foundation for developing and testing experimental interfaces which explore how people's experiences in working with digital collections and documents can be enhanced. They have been working with this theory for the past decade and have refined both the theory and their interface designs as a result of their experimentation. This book reports their findings to date and identifies issues requiring further investigation.

While search interfaces are well suited to situations where people are looking for a well‐defined target document, they provide relatively few affordances for those who need to explore a dataset in more nuanced ways and are especially limited when useful information exists in the relationships between documents, rather than in the documents themselves. Rich prospect browsers provide a different kind of environment enabling overviews of entire collections, opportunities for pattern recognition, and affordances which enable users to manipulate and explore collections in many different ways.

The research reported in this book was conducted in the context of digital humanities and the primary intention of this book is to introduce rich‐prospect browsing to a wider audience of people involved in designing user interfaces for digital cultural heritage collections. One of the principles of rich prospect browsing is that a meaningful representation of every item in a collection should be displayed on the primary screen. This principle might be assumed to preclude many digital library collections. However, this is not the case. Many of the scenarios discussed in the book address the question of how to represent visually large quantities of data. The effective visual representation of large volumes of data is regarded as important because it is often aggregations and the relationships between items which afford meaning, generate hypotheses, and enable recognition of opportunities for further action by the user. The section on dates and chronologies, for example, discusses a number of representational possibilities in addition to timelines. One of these is the interesting notion of “timefields” which draw on space‐time continuum ideas so that screen displays alter in response to changes of focus. Such displays recognise that experience of an event is not uniform for all those involved in the event or affected by it.

This book is not a light read, but for those who are serious about maximising the potential for use of digital cultural heritage, taking the time to understand the foundational theory is well worthwhile. The book provides a wide overview of issues which arise in the design of rich prospect browsers and insightful discussion into how these issues have been addressed in the experimental browsers designed by the research team. In addition to describing the nature of rich prospect browsing and naming and discussing many different types of affordance, the book also reflects on the role played by aesthetic considerations in terms of affordance strength and looks in considerable detail at issues which need to be addressed in conducting effective user studies.