Exploratory Search in Digital Humanities: A Study of Visual Keyword/Result Linking

Orland Hoeber, Morgan Harvey, Milad Momeni, Abbas Pirmoradi, David Gleeson

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

While searching within digital humanities collections is an important aspect of digital humanities research, the search features provided are usually more suited to lookup search than exploratory search. This limits the ability of digital humanities scholars to undertake complex search scenarios. Drawing upon recent studies on supporting exploratory search in academic digital libraries, we implemented two visual keyword/result linking approaches for searching within the Europeana collection; one that keeps the keywords linked to the search results and another that aggregates the keywords over the search result set. Using a controlled laboratory study, we assessed these approaches in comparison to the existing Europeana search mechanisms. We found that both visual keyword/result linking approaches were improvements over the baseline, with some differences between the new approaches that were dependent on the stage of the exploratory search process. This work illustrates the value of providing advanced search functionality within digital humanities collections to support exploratory search processes, and the need for further design and study of digital humanities search tools that support complex search scenarios.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)161-171
Number of pages11
JournalProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology
Volume61
Issue number1
Early online date15 Oct 2024
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2024
Event87th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology: Putting People First: Responsibility, Reciprocity, and Care in Information Research and Practice - Hyatt Regency Calgary, Calgary, Canada
Duration: 25 Oct 202429 Oct 2024
https://www.asist.org/am24/

Keywords

  • Interactive information retrieval
  • exploratory search
  • digital humanities collections
  • user study
  • Europeana

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