Alternative search, part 1: Using existing metadata or data

Yesterday, I mentioned three types of alternative search:

Search that uses existing human or computer supplied metadata to find and display information.
Search that analyzes a documents’ contents to return a result.
Search that relies on user added metadata

Today, I’m talking about the first technique: using existing metadata in new ways to facilitate finding and browsing. Most files have some metadata attached: the date the file was created, the date it was last altered, the owner’s name, categories, etc. Many scholarly projects have extra metadata associated with it, expertly researched or generated. Library online catalogs also have rich metadata for holdings. Many systems have rich metadata, but don’t use it in a way that helps users to find what they are looking for.

Mapping

One example of using existing metadata to help a user find what they want is mapping technologies. Take crime statistics. Many police departments are now mapping crime data on interactive, online maps. The Lincoln City Police Department is doing just that:

Map of crime provided by the Lincoln, Nebraska Police Department.

Here we have already existing data from the police blotters, which has been accessible for quite some time. In years past, one could find police blotter information in the newspaper, and later these were moved online. While it was nice to have the information, and any citizen could scan the pages to find crime in his or her area, it was very difficult to answer the question “what crimes have taken place within a quarter mile of my house in the last 5 days?” By plotting the already existing information on a map, citizens can keep watch on crime in their area.

The previous example helps the user find the answer to a specific question. Other map based systems help the user browse through materials and form new questions. This is often the case in systems for scholarly research papers. As an example, The Willa Cather Archive has a forthcoming feature which maps Willa Cather’s travels across the globe and links them both to time and to objects which include primarily letters and photos.

Screenshots for Information Retrieval paper

Screenshots of Willa Cather Archive production feature. (Feature not yet available.)

Called “Mapping a writer’s world: A Geographic Chronology of Willa Cather’s Life,” this feature allows a Willa Cather scholar to explore the archive’s collections not only through time, but through space as well. This allows the scholar to make connections that would be hard to make otherwise. The time component allows users to be led through Cather’s travels. This new view, a sort of geographic biography, brings a new perspective to Willa Cather’s life and may shatter the stereotype some have of a woman who lived her life on the plains. Similarly, map based views of documents on the site “Envisaging the west: Thomas Jefferson and the roots of Lewis and Clark” help the user find documents in space as well as time, and can help the user put documents together in new ways.

“Envisaging the West” Map view.

Etsy Geolocator.

Browsing by geography is not exclusive to scholarly works and crime maps. The commercial website Etsy, where users can buy and sell handmade goods, has several different search and browse methods, one of which will to let you find items on a map. This feature may not help you find a specific item, but it can help you find items made in your own city, therefore supporting your local economy. The geography feature has the added feature of helping sellers find local, dedicated buyers, who can support a small business.

Time

Another kind of existing metadata that can be used to make finding and browsing easier is time. Most objects have some kind of time identifier- either a time stamp added by a computer or recording device (for example, most cameras automatically imprint the time a shot was taken in the metadata) or the date something was created, added later by a scholar.

Mechanically added time stamps are marginally useful for historic objects, but for newer, born digital objects they can be very useful. For example, the aforementioned website Etsy provides another way of browsing items by sorting them by the most recently listed. This could be done through a simple list of items, but Etsy has added a 3-D component and an analog style clock that helps the user browse the items. A photo program called Picasa (offered by Google) sorts photos by date taken in the default view, offering the user a long list of chronologically ordered photos. This view depends on embedded metadata and depends not on the filename or title of a shot, but metadata associated with an object.

Etsy Time Machine.

Many documents have a date associated with them that indicate when the item was created. For instance, Zotero, a scholarly citation management system, has a field for “date” where the date of an object can be entered. If the date is not supplied in the metadata, the user can add this information. This allows for a new way to view one’s collected resources: a timeline.

Zotero timeline, showing highlighted words. The Zotero timeline was created with the help of MIT’s SIMILE project.

The timeline interface also allows users to highlight items containing certain words, which lets the user do a quick check on their own sources to answer questions such as “did scholars stop using a certain term after the turn of the century?” This kind of question would be difficult to answer given the traditional list view. Another scholarly example of mapping existing metadata to a timeline is found in the Envisaging the West website, where documents have been mapped to a timeline and color coded. This allows the user to see at a glance where documents fall on the timeline and what types occurred when.

Envisaging the West timeline view.

Faceted Browsing

A final way that existing metadata might be used is to create a method for drilling down through results via faceted browsing. With this method, information about each item is extracted and offered to the viewer so they can navigate through results with ease. Faceted browsing helps both browsing and finding: the rich metadata offers otherwise new paths to follow, and can also assist in finding a specific item by breaking aspects into categories. A few examples of these systems include a library catalog which uses extensive metadata to allow a user to navigate through items, (See McMaster University Library catalog, below), or a shopping site that allows a user to set a number of controls to find exactly the item they want (See screenshots of Buzzillions and Volkswagen UK sites, below).