The Graphical User Interfaces
The Presentation Interface
The presentation interface is designed to have two "states": a stand alone state, run from a DVD packaged with all of the data and applets needed to view it on either a PC or Mac platform; and a web enabled state. One of the goals is to keep these two user interfaces as close in appearance to each other, so that the switch from one '"state" to the other will appear to be accomplished with a simple radial toggle.
The presentation interface makes use of several "views": (1) a fieldtrip view, that shows the routes traveled, and the places and informants visited on a specific field trip or a series of fieldtrips (2) an informant view, that brings one to a close up view of an informant's local area, provides a biography of the informant, and allows one to access their repertoire and (3) a place view, that allows one to explore fieldtrips, informants or stories related with a place. Slightly more elaborate descriptions of each view appear below each of the mockups presented here. The map window in each of these mockups currently does not display the mapping interface that will be employed.
Default view
The default view is a modified "fieldtrip" view. Along the top of the gui are a series of links that give one access to detailed essays on Evald Tang Kristensen and his collection, nineteenth century Denmark, the study of folklore, and a series of tools related to indexing, word study and visualization of textual relationships, and scholarly bibliographic resources. Along the bottom of the map, one can select one or more field trips, while along the right hand side, one can choose an informant or place for greater study.
Fieldtrip view--trip selected
Selecting a fieldtrip brings up that route on the map (more detailed examples can be found in the discussion of mapping).
When a fieldtrip is selected, the list of informants and places is reduced to reflect only those informants or places visited on that fieldtrip.
A link brings one to the pages in the memoirs that describe that field trip.
Informant and Place view
The informant view provides one with a photo album (upper right), a long biography, an index of an informant's stories, in
the order in which they were told, and limits the list of fieldtrips along the bottom of the map to those trips where ETK visited
the informant.
A header in the index brings one to the fieldtrip view for that group of stories (informants were often visited several times).
The place view is similar to the informant view, but replaces the informant biography with a local description and photo album, provides
a list of informants in the immediate area (including points plotted on the maps), and an index of all stories that mention the place.
One will have the option to plot all local stories onto the map window.
Finally, the list of fieldtrips will be limited to trips that visited that place.
An experimental version of the gui can be found here.
A static view, incorporating a sattelite image of current Denmark, could be overlayed with historical maps, allowing one to swap
views between the cartographic representation of the landscape in the 1880s and a recent photographic representation.
Story view
One of the most important views is the story view. Clicking on any story index number or plotted point brings one to the story view for that story. This view provides one access to both the original Danish and the English translation of the story in its original manuscript form and in its edited published form. It also provides a scholarly annotation and images of the field diary manuscript pages. Finally, it provides a link to the word study and visualization tools that allow for sophisticated analysis of texts, and other standard folklore indices that allow for variant discovery and comparison.
This image shows a story in English translation of both the original Danish version, and the published Danish version.
This image shows the scholarly annotation for the story.
And this image shows the manuscript viewer.
The Acquisition and Editing Interfaces
Neither the acquisition nor the editing interfaces have been designed yet. Current discussions propose that the acquisition interface allow the user to select the type of asset to be acquired, and the target database for the asset(s). Bulk acquisition of numerous, similar assets will speed the process (ie potentially including the acquisition of the 11,000+ scans of the field diary). During this stage, certain types of metadata will be generated for each asset, or class of assets. Some assets will be stored in multiple databases to take advantage of certain features related to that database system. For example, story files will be stored not only in the CDL system, but also in Greenstone to take advantage of the unique wordstudy and visualization tools available there. Rather than do this during acquisition, assets will be mirrored after acquisition.
The editing and publication interfaces will also need to be developed. Some of these interfaces already exist in the context of specific applications, such as ArcGIS. There is no reason to incorporate application specific editing interfaces into a unified one. On the other hand, an interface to edit and create metadata needs to be selected, as does an interface for the transcription and mark up of manuscripts. The interface will need to include check-in/check-out functions, the ability to define roles, and versioning control. Fortunately, several other projects at UCLA are also working on this problem, and we expect to leverage this new expertise into a system that can be used for many projects. Finally, we need to design a system that allows a user to select a group of assets for "publication", either by releasing to the web or printing to DVD. The use of XML and well-structured databases, coupled to well-described assets will make this process easier.