I considered the best feasible way to visualize dates in our result sets. When you can have a thousands (or tens or hundreds of thousands) of documents in your result set, putting each one of them on a timeline seemed infeasible. What I was able to come up with instead was a sort of histogram/bar-graph timeline that grouped the results into a sort of fixed resolution.
Check it out: Click on 'Publication Year' on any result set after doing a search [or click on the graph on the main page, but I think it's more useful after a search], and see a timeline; you can also 'drill down' into the timeline, and you'll then see a sort of 'zoomed in' timeline of the range you selected.
https://blacklight.mse.jhu.edu/demo
The resolution of the bars is currently set at around 10, but I believe the underlying Solr search engine powering this could handle higher -- 20, certainly, 100, maybe but not sure. Haven't played with it, since this seemed good enough for now and I had other things to work on. It's actually just a parameter in the code though, could be set to any number. And of course the graph could be displayed larger, as on the first page, but didn't seem useful in this interface to do so.
I think it turned out pretty slick.
That's an under development demo of the blacklight/solr powered opac replacement we're working on, it's not in production and is a bit wonky occasionally. And yes, it's got a non-trusted SSL cert sorry, need to fix it soon.
Jonathan
________________________________________
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Eric Lease Morgan [emorgan_at_ND.EDU]
Sent: Monday, December 20, 2010 9:53 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: [NGC4LIB] our profession's bibliographic information
Our profession's bibliographic information is very qualitative in nature, and consequently the information is difficult to objectively compare & contrast.
The closest we have to quantitative information are dates and number of pages. Even these are ambiguous. Dates are oftentimes only years, and they denote when the item was published, not necessarily when it was conceived. The number of pages in a book tells one very little. A better measure of length would be number of words.
Given ownership (not access) of full text, a person can count the number of words in a document and begin to learn all sorts of things about it. The things a person learns can be compared to other texts to make additional observations. A perfect case in point is the recently and unceremoniously announced Google Books Ngram Viewer. Imagine doing a search in our "catalog", getting back a list of documents, and then creating graphs illustrating trends.
For a good time, I thought I would try to implement an interactive timeline based on the dates in my personal writings. [1] Assuming these writings are analogous to bibliogrpahic records, I was wondering whether or not a timeline interface could be integrated into "discovery systems". From the conclusion of my blog posting [2]:
Library "discovery systems" could benefit from the implementation
of timelines. Do a search. Get back a list of results. Plot them
on a timeline. Allow the learner, teacher, or scholar to
visualize — literally see — how the results of their query
compare to one another. The ability to visualize information
hinges on the ability to quantify information characteristics. In
this case, the quantification is a set of dates. Alas, dates in
our information systems are poorly recorded. It seems as if we —
the library profession — have made it difficult for ourselves to
participate in the current information environment.
I really do not think we are not taking full advantage of the tools we have at our disposal, and the format of our data make the process even harder.
[1] blog posting - http://bit.ly/fSHeCT
[2] timeline - http://bit.ly/eKCHNh
--
Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame
"Take the Great Books Survey -- http://bit.ly/auPD9Q"
Received on Mon Dec 20 2010 - 23:13:49 EST