Session:  If I had a hammer:
New Affordances for Digital Interfaces
Stan Ruecker
Assistant Professor
Humanities Computing Program
Department of English and Film Studies
3-5 Humanities Centre
University of Alberta
Edmonton, AB
T6G 2E5
sruecker@ualberta.ca
J. Gibson (1979) defines an affordance as an opportunity for action; E. Gibson (2000) points out that the perception and use of opportunities for action is something that must be learned. In this context, a variety of researchers (e.g. Vicente 2002) have spoken of interface design as the attempt to create new digital affordances. This session brings together three presentations that deal, either with the design of new opportunities for action, or with the design of new strategies to improve on existing opportunities for action that have typically proven intransigent.

The first paper deals with query formulation that relies on the use of multilingual thesauri. A controlled vocabulary in multiple languages is a marvelous resource, but a range of interfaces to exploit this resource have yet to find their way into the literature, or into public release. “A Tabular Thesaurus Browser to Support Multilingual Queries” discusses the design of an interface that allows the use of multilingual thesauri in query formulation. By combining browsing spaces for the thesaurus terms, the query, and the resulting documents, this interactive system creates a means for users to simultaneously search in multiple languages.

Despite recent calls by researchers such as Helfand (2002), the visual arrangement of search results, or in some cases the entire contents of a collection, is an area of interface design that has yet to receive widespread attention. The second paper in this session, entitled “Centering the mind and calming the heart: mandalas as interfaces,” addresses the use of a structural system for displaying information, derived from an analysis of a variety of mandalas. A set of static sketches and an early version of a working prototype suggest some of the possibilities inherent in this approach.

The third talk deals with issues of conference overload, where participants are simply unable to mentally accommodate all the information available in a typical academic gathering. Entitled “I never forget a face: A rich prospect image browser for conferences,” it explores the possibility of providing a means of obtaining prospect on an entire conference, by associating information about the registrants, the presentations, and the schedule with a display of their faces.


Title:        A Tabular Thesaurus Browser to Support Multilingual Queries


Karl Anvik
MA student

Humanities Computing Program
Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies
University of Alberta
Edmonton AB 
T6G 2E6

    kanvik@ualberta.ca

Ali Shiri
    Assistant Professor

    School of Library and Information Studies
    University of Alberta
    3-09 Rutherford South
Edmonton, AB
T6G 2J4

    ashiri@ualberta.ca

Ximena Rossello
    MDes student

    Department of Art and Design
    3-98 Fine Arts Building
    University of Alberta
    Edmonton AB 
T6G 2C9
 
    rossello@ualberta.ca

Stan Ruecker
Assistant Professor

Humanities Computing Program
Department of English and Film Studies
3-5 Humanities Centre
University of Alberta
Edmonton, AB
T6G 2E5
      
sruecker@ualberta.ca
Media:        Presentation with digital projector

There are a growing number of search interfaces that have been enhanced with thesauri. Most of these are text-based interfaces (Shiri et al., 2002), although some prototypes have been designed that employ graphical displays, primarily for the MeSH Thesaurus. Examples of the latter include TraverseNet (McMath et al., 1989), MeSHBrowse (Korn and Shneiderman, 1995), Cat-a-cone (Hearst and Karadi, 1997) and Visual MeSH (Xin, 1999).

The goal of this project is to create an interface tool that allows the user to develop queries in one language that can be run in multiple languages. Using the Government of Canada Core Subject Thesaurus, the current prototype supports two languages: English and French. However, the system is intended to be flexible enough to accommodate a range of several languages—whatever can be supported by existing multilingual thesauri.

Drawing on principles suggested by Bertin (1983), this prototype interface uses a tabular structure to allow for compression of a large amount of relevant information into a comparatively small working space. By supporting the simultaneous browsing of the thesaurus, the query being constructed, and the resulting document set, the user is able not only to access documents in multiple languages, but also to begin to understand the nature of the multilingual thesaurus as a controlled vocabulary for searching.
Title:  Centering the Mind and Calming the Heart: Mandalas as Interfaces
Author(s):    Oksana Cheypesh, Constanza Pacher, Sandra Gabriele, Stéfan Sinclair, Drew Paulin, and Stan Ruecker
Oksana Cheypesh
MA student

Humanities Computing Program
University of Alberta
Edmonton AB  T6G 2E5 
cheypesh@ualberta.ca
Constanza Pacher
Instructor

Grant MacEwan College
Box 1796
Edmonton, AB  T5J 2P2
conspacher@hotmail.com
      
Sandra Gabriele
Assistant Professor

Department of Design
4008 TEL
York University
Toronto, ON  M3J 1P3 
gabriele@istar.ca
Stéfan Sinclair
Assistant Professor

School of the Arts (SOTA)
McMaster University
Togo Salmon Hall 414
1280 Main Street West
Hamilton ON  L8S 4M2 
sgs@mcmaster.ca
Drew Paulin
School of the Arts (SOTA)

McMaster University
Togo Salmon Hall 414
1280 Main Street West
Hamilton ON  L8S 4M2 
sappam@mcmaster.ca
Stan Ruecker
Assistant Professor

Humanities Computing Program
Department of English and Film Studies
3-5 Humanities Centre
University of Alberta
Edmonton, AB  T6G 2E5
sruecker@ualberta.ca


Media:  Presentation with Digital Projector

Twentieth-century modernist design for printed materials involved the widespread adoption of grid systems. Grids provide designers and readers with a means of organizing the visual field, allowing the suggestion that even disconnected elements fall within a pattern, especially across multiple spreads. Grids are a powerful organizing tool and their significance cannot be over-stated. However, particularly in the context of interface design, they can imply a certain underlying organization of the data which is not necessarily accurate. For instance, within a Cartesian grid, there is a sense in which items are interchangeable: every item is at the same level in the collection. However, as Winograd and Flores (1986) point out, in an ideal interface design, the structure of the visual field should reflect the underlying nature of the collection.

This paper outlines an attempt to explore a powerful alternative to the Cartesian grid, through extrapolating from the underlying geometry of a variety of mandalas. With a visual history that spans literally thousands of years, mandalas have a number of features that make them attractive candidates for interface designs. They are typically balanced. They demonstrate the concept of containment, usually with a structured interior, often combined with a strong central tendency. They are visually unified. This combination presents possibilities for the design of interfaces that not only can reflect a wide range of underlying architectures, but also stand in opposition to a “technological aesthetic” that privileges forms built from acute angles and rectangular shapes.
Title:        I never forget a face: A rich prospect image browser for conferences

Author(s):    Stan Ruecker, Michael Lewcio, Michael Plouffe, Maryanne Wynne
Stan Ruecker
Assistant Professor

Humanities Computing Program
Department of English and Film Studies
3-5 Humanities Centre
University of Alberta
Edmonton, AB  T6G 2E5
sruecker@ualberta.ca
      
Michael Lewcio
MA student

Humanities Computing Program
University of Alberta
Edmonton AB  T6G 2E5
lewcio@gmail.com

Michael Plouffe
Humanities Computing Program

University of Alberta
Edmonton AB  T6G 2E5
gomikego@shaw.ca

Maryanne Wynne
Humanities Computing Program

University of Alberta
Edmonton AB  T6G 2E5
maryanne.wynne@ualberta.ca

Media:   Presentation with digital projector

We currently navigate conferences with the schedule as our map, identifying sessions we intend to visit like islands on a cruise.  But a conference is a dynamic event: schedules change, conversations occur, networks develop.  We scribble on our maps and collect pocketfuls of business cards and wonder where that social scientist from Saskatchewan is giving the paper he talked about at dinner last night.

Conference registration, schedules, abstracts, papers, presenter biographies, and proceedings represent an astounding quantity of valuable information, which is near maddening to retrieve and which cannot incorporate the human interaction that is a vital benefit to attending conferences.

Our thesis is that a rich prospect image browser can improve the conference experience by connecting biographic, academic, and schedule data to a digital image of each delegate.  We are currently undertaking preliminary usability testing of a prototype interface where a complete set of attendee pictures appears in an html browser, along with a sorting toolbar that includes gender, name, location, affiliation, keyword, and similar information collected in the registration process. Participants are asked to perform tasks involving delegate identification and classification.

Preliminary results of this usability testing are addressing the following question:  can a rich prospect interface provide more precise and intuitive sorting capacity and improve retrieval?  There is a significant advantage in using visual representations (current digital photos) of delegates in the interface; this entails, however, practical matters such as adding a photo step to the registration process and respecting applicable laws for the protection of privacy.