Envisioning User Access to a Large Data Archive

We are overwhelmed by the vast amounts of data accumulating daily. The extraction of information from online data sources is becoming more and more difficult. For example, if a query to a large archive returns hundreds of “hits”, the most effective presentation is probably not a list of items, but some other type of graphical display. The concept of spatialization offers a promising potential to overcome the current impediments of retrieving items from large volume archives. Spatialization involves effective combination of powerful scientific visualization techniques with spatial metaphors that represent data that are not necessarily spatial in nature. Familiar spatial concepts such as distance and direction, scale, arrangement etc. which are part of the human experience in everyday life, are applied to create lower-dimensional digital representations of complex digital data. Skupin and Buttenfield (1996;1997) have demonstrated how spatial metaphors can be constructed for abstract information spaces. However, as these authors (1996: 616) point out, there has not yet been any subject testing to determine the appropriateness of such methods for visualization. We are not certain how people comprehend spatialized views, or whether the components of distance, direction and so forth are understood by viewers. This paper presents an experimental design to explore how spatialized views are understood by users. Subject testing procedures on graphical displays are outlined, which include the collection of performance measures on information retrieval tasks. The experimental application will rely on data collected from the Alexandria Digital Library Project.