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This research is funded by the
The Arts and Humanities Research Council supports and promotes
high-quality and innovative research in the arts and humanities.
Principle Investigator: Dr Ian Anderson
Research Assistant: Dr Steve
North
As more archival finding aids, of increasing complexity, become available online the difficulty of seeing the 'wood from the trees' increases. This is particularly the case when these are implemented in EAD (Encoded Archival Description). In part, this is caused by the inherent difficulty of navigating hierarchical structures (the need go back up and across before you can go down again) but also a symptom of the lack of innovation in visualising archival information. This project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, seeks to test a novel approach to structuring and visualising archival information by applying a novel visualisation interface to two existing EAD finding aids that have been transformed into Ted Nelson's ZigZag™structure.
ZigZag structures finding aid content as a series of cells, these are then linked together to form dimensions (for example, function). As each cell can belong to more than one dimension this allows a visualisation that combines selected dimensions (for example files by functional activity), but also displays other available dimensions without cluttering users current view.
Background Information
System Architecture (jpeg format, opens in a new window)
Archive to ZigZag Mapping (jpeg format, opens in a new window)
Links between files (jpeg format, opens in a new window)
Demo 1
Demo 2
Contact
Dr.
Ian G. Anderson
HATII
George Service House
11 University Gardens
University of Glasgow
Phone:
+44 (0)141 330 3843
Fax: +44 (0)141 330 3788
E-mail: I.Anderson@hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk
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