What would be the point of creating an enormous digital archive of videos, books and newspapers if we wouldn't be able to use its full potential? Developing more trustworthy and accurate search engines is key to exploring all of an archive's contents. When searching for audiovisual materials, media researchers have to spend a lot of their research time on exploring the archives manually to get to a successful retrieval. Words that they use for searching often differ from an archivist's terminology, which means it's hard to know when they really found all the materials that are relevant to their research.
If search engines only depend on the keywords typed into the search engine, relevant data omission is triggered and a researcher can't be sure whether the data that are displayed really constitute the most accurate sources available on a certain topic. Marc Bron, a doctoral student from the Intelligent System Labs Amsterdam (ISLA) at the University of Amsterdam, identified this problem and, together with his colleagues from ISLA, the Utrecht University's Centre for Television in Transition and the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, developed an improved an explorative interface named the Media Researchers’ Data Exploration Suite (MeRDES). This interface manages to give researchers a broader view on the contents of the archive and on possibly related topics by presenting the outcomes side by side with a mirrored search tool. By incorporating related search terms and data visualisation tools this aids the researcher to visually explore multiple views on a topic and discover patterns in the search results. This exploratory interface allows for quicker steps forward in the design and specificity of the research question and brings media researcher closer to getting the full picture.
In order to test the new system, Marc Bron and researcher Jasmijn Van Gorp (UU) carried out a user research involving 40 media students and scholars. Bron recently presented the outcomes of their research at the International Conference of the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR), which took place in Portland. A demo of the interface can be viewed at: http://zookma.science.uva.nl/merdesdemo. Marc and Jasmijn’s work has been carried out in the framework of the NWO-project BRIDGE (Building Rich Links to Enable Television History Research), which constitutes a part of the CATCH (Continuous Access to Cultural Heritage) programme.
Links
- Research paper: A Subjunctive Exploratory Search Interface to Support Media Studies Researchers
- Blog post: CATCH Meeting Report: Supporting Media Studies Research by Julia Vytopil on July 2nd, 2012
- Article [NL]: Slimmer zoeken in archieven door nieuw-ontwikkelde interface, NWO site, Aug 10, 2012
- Article [NL]: Nieuwe interface vergemakkelijkt zoeken in archieven, UvA, Aug 21, 2012