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 language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 161-171 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology |
Volume | 61 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 15 Oct 2024 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Oct 2024 |
Event | 87th 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 2024 → 29 Oct 2024 https://www.asist.org/am24/ |
Keywords
- Interactive information retrieval
- exploratory search
- digital humanities collections
- user study
- Europeana