Search results

This paper seeks to describe a qualitative user study of Searchling – an experimental visual interface that allows users to leverage a bilingual thesaurus for query formulation and enhancement.

The design of Searchling is based on theories of thesaurus‐based interface design, combined with the principles of rich‐prospect browsing. The Searchling interface provides the user with three working spaces on one screen: the Thesaurus space, Query space, and Document space. A total of 15 graduate and faculty researchers at the University of Alberta, were interviewed, who carried out three structured tasks in a thinkaloud protocol, with simultaneous audio recording and screen capture.

The participants identified a number of significant advantages to the researchers provided by Searchling, including the value of having an interface that could help with identifying search terms, suggesting preferred terms, and giving bilingual search support. They also suggested areas for future improvement, primarily related to the assumption that common knowledge of thesauri would be sufficient to make the various features clear, if they were described using standard vocabulary from the thesaurus field.

The interface can be implemented as an operational user interface to support users' exploratory and browsing behaviours.

The paper describes a new visual way of incorporating a thesaurus into a user interface with the ability of browsing, querying and examining the results all at the same time.

This study seeks to apply ecological psychology's concept of “affordance” to graduate students' information behavior in the academic library, and to explore the extent to which the affordances experienced by graduate students differed from the affordances librarians were attempting to provide.

In‐depth, qualitative interviews with graduate students and academic librarians explored how the students perceived and used the library's various “opportunities for action” (e.g. books, databases, instructional sessions, librarians, physical space, etc.) and compared these perceptions and behavior with librarians' intentions and expectations.

Findings indicate a disparity between expectations and experience and point to graduate students as an underserved population in this context, especially in terms of the library's outreach efforts. In addition, because graduate students are increasingly teaching introductory undergraduate courses, communication methods that bypass graduate students tend to miss undergraduate students as well.

Practical implications discussed in this paper include possible methods of improving communication channels between graduate students and academic librarians, and considerations for information literacy instruction.

This paper presents a unique perspective by using affordance theory to frame students and librarians' expectations about library services. The findings are particularly valuable for their implications for library‐patron communication and information literacy.

This paper presents a co-authorship study of authors who published in Digital Humanities journals and examines the apparent influence of gender, or more specifically, the quantitatively detectable influence of gender in the networks they form.

This study applied co-authorship network analysis. Data has been collected from three canonical Digital Humanities journals over 52 years (1966–2017) and analysed.

The results are presented as visualised networks and suggest that female scholars in Digital Humanities play more central roles and act as the main bridges of collaborative networks even though overall female authors are fewer in number than male authors in the network.

This is the first co-authorship network study in Digital Humanities to examine the role that gender appears to play in these co-authorship networks using statistical analysis and visualisation.

This paper presents a follow-on study that quantifies geolingual markers and their apparent connection with authorship collaboration patterns in canonical Digital Humanities (DH) journals. In particular, it seeks to detect patterns in authors' countries of work and languages in co-authorship networks.

Through an in-depth co-authorship network analysis, this study analysed bibliometric data from three canonical DH journals over a range of 52 years (1966–2017). The results are presented as visualised networks with centrality calculations.

The results suggest that while DH scholars may not collaborate as frequently as those in other disciplines, when they do so their collaborations tend to be more international than in many Science and Engineering, and Social Sciences disciplines. DH authors in some countries (e.g. Spain, Finland, Australia, Canada, and the UK) have the highest international co-author rates, while others have high national co-author rates but low international rates (e.g. Japan, the USA, and France).

This study is the first DH co-authorship network study that explores the apparent connection between language and collaboration patterns in DH. It contributes to ongoing debates about diversity, representation, and multilingualism in DH and academic publishing more widely.

It's been three years since my previous survey in RSR. Superb reference books in pop music have been appearing so frequently that I've been having trouble keeping up. Let's hope “next year's” survey will only be 12 months in the making and not 36.