Missed the very beginning. Stan Ruecker again; Milena Radzikowska (Mount Royal College); and Stéfan Sinclair (McMaster University). “Communicating process with form: designing the visual morphology of the Nora data mining kernels.” Stan presents the new Nora interface. Which is VERY pretty, but sadly not viewable online (but see the Nora link below).
Rich-prospect interfaces:
– some meaningful representation of every item in the collection
– tools for manipulating the display
– tools shiould rely on information emergent from the collection
– [missed the other three]
Introduces NORA.
Purpose:
– classification and pattern recognition (“find me documents that I’ve identified, and tell me the features that you’re working with.”)
– “specifically, we aim at allowing literary scholars to identify categories of interest in collections of literary texts, and then to find new members of those categories and explore the features that correlate with those categories…” -John Unsworth
“Kernels” are objects that you’re working with. As you group cultural artifacts together and define some criteria for grouping, the kernel’s (initially blank-outline) iconocragphic representation changes, becomes more complex. Each kernel has five different states, from blank to very complex: leaves, snowflakes, concentric circles and other metaphors – they don’t seem to have settled on a single metaphor yet, but they’ve agreed that five states are definitely not enough.
You generally have multiple kernels, with a pallette for each; so you can see a bird’s-eye view of all your kernels. You can also “save” a kernel by dragging it to the “deasktop” environment (this is all happening in your browser), and then you can share that kernel image with others or refer to it in your own research later.
Sort of a Photoshop for text analysts. With much, much easier controls. I’m looking forward to more development of this!
NORA (No One Remembers Acronyms) is merging soon with MONK (Metadata Opens New Knowledge). Soon they’ll all be known as MONKeys!
Last paper of the day – the rest will be posters. see y’all tomorrow.
