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Down in the digital library skunkworks · 24 January 2005
It’s a bit like having a glimpse into the greasy workshop of Messrs. Wright—take a bird (a library) and make a plane (a digital library). Is it better to model the shape and the wingbeat, or merely to borrow the concept and build something totally new?
Digital libraries have been around for a decade or more, but they’re still very much in the silk-scarf and barnstorming phase: plenty of wild experimentation, the odd crackup, lots of spirited debate. When I can, I try to follow the developments at both ends of the philosophical spectrum. On one hand are the cool abstractionists, those who are intent on synthesizing entirely new ways of browsing document collections, often with odd, but frequently compelling, visualization tools. A now-classic example is the 10-year-old hyperbolic tree interface developed by Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. Using the idea of a fisheye lense to increase one’s field of view, the developers made it possible to see the titles of hundreds, even thousands, of documents simultaneously and to glimpse the relationships between them. (The paper explaining the project is accessible here.) In another variation on the abstractionist theme, my friend David (or try here) completed his PhD thesis exploring whether it might be more effective than a regular file directory to have a person explore a virtual, three-dimensional world to find information. David transformed subject exploration into virtual island-hopping to take advantage of the kind of wayfinding skills one uses in the real world. (His results are inconclusive, but the thesis is very cool.)
On the other hand are the neo-literalists, transposing recognizable aspects of libraries into the digital realm, and leveraging, they would say, users’ cognitive mapping of real libraries into virtual space. (Translation: if you’ve been to a library before, you’ll know basically how they work, and if a virtual library looks similar, you’ll presumably be able to make your way around and do things without being taught.) There are two papers I know of in this regard that are truly wonderful—very much in the spirit of Orville and Wilbur in the bicycle shop tinkering in the wee, wee hours.
My favourite remains an experiment by Michael Christoffel and Bethina Schmitt, two researchers at Karlsruhe University, who in 2002 published their result of recreating a walkthrough model of the university’s main library using the three-dimensional rendering abilities of the videogame Quake II. Now, this game is known as a “first-person shooter” and normally involves watching a screen whose main identifiables are an enormous gun (wielded by you) and generous quantities of exploding flesh (your worthy opponents). Christoffel and Schmitt make a rather hilarious attempt to calm the game down for academic use by transforming the personal artillery into a laser pointer, which one may point, bazooka-like, at a virtual shelf to retrieve a virtual book. The pair conclude, however, with a mild warning that the normal mode of Quake II may have unfortunate resonance with some students if their prototype is adopted for library use: “Although our library interface is harmless, it is possible to use the same game engine with maps found in the Internet which may have an unexpected influence on some few [sic] people.” (Read their paper here.)
More recently, another group of researchers from New Zealand’s University of Waikato have gone to some lengths to create a model of a physical book to add tactility to the experience of online reading. The project of Yi-Chun Chu, David Bainbridge, Matt Jones and Ian H. Witten involved first replicating individual page turns in great animatronic detail, followed by—in year two—the construction of a model book with fusty qualities: signature marks, a flexing spine and pages that become grubbier with use. As a modelling exercise, the experiment is high on the quirkiness scale. Bravely, the four quote the less-than-glowing verdict of one of their academic referees in the paper’s subtitle: Realistic books: A bizarre homage to an obsolete medium?
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