Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections

Decades of digitisation have made a wealth of digital cultural material available online. Yet search — the dominant interface to these collections — is incapable of representing this abundance. Search is ungenerous: it withholds information, and demands a query. This paper argues for a more generous alternative: rich, browsable interfaces that reveal the scale and complexity of digital heritage collections. Drawing on related work and precedents from information retrieval and visualisation, as well as critical humanistic approaches to the interface, this paper documents and analyses practical experiments in generous interfaces developed in collaboration with Australian cultural institutions. Imagine yourself outside an art gallery in a far-off city, with a collection you don’t know well. You enter the building to find a small, drab lobby with an attendant at a desk. The attendant asks you to enter your query on a small slip of paper. Not knowing the collection, and not seeking anything in particular, you write down something arbitrary, and pass it over. The attendant disappears for a moment before returning with a line of artworks sitting on trolleys. These are paraded, ten at a time, through the lobby. You can submit another query at any time, calling forth more trolleys, but there seems to be no way to explore the gallery beyond this small lobby. As absurd as it seems, this scenario is played out daily on the web sites of libraries, archives, galleries and museums around the world, where keyword search is the central — often the only — way to access the collection. The dichotomy embodied here can be framed through the notion of generosity. Decades of digitisation have made a wealth of digital cultural material available online. The Victoria and Albert Museum offers over a million items; Europeana’s aggregated collection numbers some 31 million; the National Library of Australia’s Trove hosts around 128 million digitised newspaper articles. A recent survey of some 1200 institutions in the UK and Europe found that 80% have digitised collections, and these are increasingly coming online [ENUMERATE 2014]. This is a truly generous mass: large, abundant, ample. Yet in response to this abundance, collection interfaces wheel out miserly lists, one page at a time. Generosity entails more than scale, too: another of its senses describes an ethos of giving or sharing freely. These values tally well with the aims of many collecting institutions — especially public institutions, mandated to provide broad and open access. But here too, search is ungenerous. It fails to be liberal in sharing: instead of throwing open the doors, its greeting is "Yes, what?" As an interface, search fails to match the ample abundance of our digital collections and the generous ethos of the institutions that hold them. A more generous interface would do more to represent the scale and richness of its collection. It would open the doors, tear down the drab lobby; instead of demanding a query it would offer multiple ways in, and support exploration as well as the focused enquiry where search excels. In revealing the complexity of digital collections, a generous interface would also enrich interpretation by revealing relationships and structures within a collection. This is not to question the effectiveness of search or its value for many users. Empirical research shows that many visitors come to a museum website seeking specific information [Fantoni et al. 2012]. However, a significant number of visitors do not have a specific goal: in a survey of the motivations of some 34,000 visitors to Dutch museum websites, 29% report seeking specific information, but 21% visit to "engage in casual browsing" [INTK n.d.]. Another recent study finds that browse features are valued highly by non-expert visitors to online art collections [Lopatovska et al. 2013]. Thus from the user’s perspective, search is an incomplete solution. In this context, more generous interfaces are beginning to emerge. The sites of the Rijksmuseum> and the Walker Art Centre, for example, emphasise browsing and visual exploration. While the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collections page privileges search, it also generously includes a random sampling of works. Experimental and overtly poetic approaches to 7/31/2017 DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/1/000205/000205.html#p1 2/16 6