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

摘要

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.