notes & links

David Binkley Emerging Technology Award Presentation: Experimental Interfaces for the Dynamic Visual Grouping of Data During Browsing (link to podcast)
Dr. Stan Ruecker (U Alberta)

This was my favorite talk of the day. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot to say about it. It was very research-based and academic, which is probably why I liked it - I’m odd that way.

He also demonstrated a lot of different ways of visualizing information that again got back to the importance of browsing and serendipity in the information seeking process. We spend a lot of time thinking about search, and that’s valid and important. But I did find it interesting how many people were talking about ways to make the browsing experience more robust or meaningful. Pedagogically I think this is a really interesting and really important development. All of us who teach undergrads know that they are really not very good at choosing keywords. And in the decontextualized world of the keyword search, they are often at a loss - they don’t have the experience with a topic to understand how the concepts they’re interested in might fit together within the discourse so they have trouble with everything from searching to finding to reading to taking notes to writing.

Browsing addresses some of these issues. Ruecker’s talk really showed how the browsing experience depends on connections between ideas - visual, thematic, metaphoric, etc. It was interesting to think about how a dynamic browsing experience might help students explore a topic or concept in a way that also lets them experience the context and the discourse that produced the idea.

I’ve already showed some of the projects he demonstrated to students who were just brought to the library to “see what academic libraries are like” — it has been fun.