These are the slides from my talk, titled “Exploring highly interconnected humanities data: are faceted browsers always the answer?“.

Essentially, this is a slightly revised version of the paper I presented a couple of years ago at the Digital Humanities conference in Stanford. It centres around the notion of ‘pivoting‘ in faceted browsers, the use of these tools in the digital humanities and some practical examples based on DJFacet, an implementation of a customizable faceted search engine written in Python/Django.

Wikipedia describes faceted search as

“a technique for accessing a collection of information represented using a faceted classification, allowing users to explore by filtering available information. A faceted classification system allows the assignment of multiple classifications to an object, enabling the classifications to be ordered in multiple ways, rather than in a single, pre-determined, taxonomic order”.

Although faceted search systems aim at providing search interfaces that go beyond the model of a single, rigid, top-down catalogue for an information space, taxonomical classifications remain always one of the most useful ways to organise a dataset, as they implicitly provide support for ‘zoom in’ and ‘zoom out’ search operations. A good compromise then is to allow the simultaneous selection of search filters coming from different taxonomical schemas – or mixing them with non-taxonomical ones.

Version 0.9.7 of Djfacet, among several other things, includes full support for displaying and navigating through hierarchical facets as long as they are expressed in the DB via django-MPTT. A demo is available here (just browse into the ‘religion’ facet to see what I mean).

There are still a few things to sort out before reaching version 1.0 (including updating the online docs), but it’s getting closer – stay tuned!

Links:

I’ve been working on DJFacet on and off for more than a year now, so I’m really happy to finally release a stable version of it. The software is still under active development, so be certain that in the coming months new features and bug fixes will be released!

 


 
In a nutshell, the main features of DJFacet are:

Find out more about it using these links:

There are quite a few resources freely available on the web that might help you with building a faceted browser; to this purpose (and in conjunction with a research seminar we had at CCH) I’ve put together a conceptual map that attempts to organize this wealth of information a bit more..

N I N E S stands for a Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship, a scholarly organization in British and American nineteenth-century studies supported by a software development group assembling a suite of critical and editorial tools for digital scholarship.

In NINES you can:

• search and browse more than 60,000 texts and images
• collect documents, articles, images, and ephemera into sets you make
• label your collections with tags you generate
• create syllabi, annotated bibliographies, illustrated essays, and timelines
• explore related collections and exhibits by fellow scholars

Nines it’s just a first showcase for Collex, a SW suite of tools targeted at a humanities scholarly practitioners:

Collex is a set of tools designed to aid students and scholars working in networked archives and federated repositories of humanities materials: a sophisticated COLLections and EXhibits mechanism for the semantic web.

Collex allows users to collect, annotate, and tag online objects and to repurpose them in illustrated, interlinked essays or exhibits. It functions within any modern web browser without recourse to plugins or downloads and is fully networked as a server-side application. By saving information about user activity (the construction of annotated collections and exhibits) as “remixable” metadata, the Collex system writes current practice into the scholarly record and permits knowledge discovery based not only on the characteristics or “facets” of digital objects, but also on the contexts in which they are placed by a community of scholars.

It is produced by the SpecLab at UVA, which has done many other interesting projects in humanities and computing.

The Speculative Computing Laboratory (SpecLab) was organized to promote experimental and exploratory research in Digital Humanities. SpecLab projects build on work in applied digital humanities — at IATH, VCDH, E-Text and elsewhere — that has established the University of Virginia as a leader in humanities computing. By definition, SpecLab projects are interdisciplinary and innovative, often undertaken with uncertain outcomes for the sake of expanding the methods and assumptions of Digital Humanities.

A couple of screenshots from Nines :

1) you can search items also on the sidebar, and collect and tag them to build your personalized set.

2) the search interface is amazing i think: add/remove constraints from the repositories you want to search in a very visual manner!