ABSTRACT
This book has had several purposes. First, we hoped to introduce the principles of rich-prospect browsing to a wider audience of people working with digital cultural collections, with the hope that they would begin to implement these ideas in their own collections. Second, we wanted to show why we feel that this set of principles represents a useful way of looking at the design of browsing tools – namely, that we feel it has some theoretical grounding in the concepts of prospect and affordances, and that our various experiments have helped to examine and refine the principles. Third, we believed it might be possible to add to the ideas of prospect and affordances, by considering them in the light of the various tools we’ve built and the experiments we’ve run on them. Although there are some obvious limitations to what is possible with a rich-prospect design, there are limitations to what is possible with every kind of design. The decision that people need to make is therefore best informed by suggesting to them what the trade-offs are in choosing one approach over another. In the case of rich-prospect interfaces, the benefits are that the combination of meaningful representation of items with emergent tools for manipulating the display potentially results in an intuitive way for users to understand an entire collection and how its designers conceived of it. People are also able to see information that can remind them of things they’ve forgotten, or suggest to them things that they never knew. They can be reassured about what is included in a collection and what is not there. In some forms of rich prospect, the patterns that the interface generates can be used for critical tasks such as algorithmic criticism (textual analysis) or cultural analytics (studying large-scale cultural phenomena using digital artifacts). The difficulties arise in choosing an appropriate meaningful representation and in working with the available screen real estate and processing power.
