| dc.description.abstract | This thesis explores interfaces for locating and comprehending patterns among
time-based materials in digital libraries. Time-based digital library materials are
like other digital library materials in that they are comprised of data and
metadata. In addition, they have a time or period of time attached to each data
item. The specific focus of this thesis is on fine-granularity items-items that
have relatively little data and cover brief periods of time. In such a context,
people often are left to discern patterns of activity by retrospectively making
sense of the collection or parts thereof. The specific domain chosen for the
implementation is the daily diary of President George Bush, the 41st president of
the USA. This project developed a searching and browsing interface, which
allows people to study the relationship between activities and people in the library
data. As part of this thesis, a corpus of the Presidential daily diary was digitized.
Two interfaces were provided to this corpus, one based on a standard
information retrieval engine (Greenstone) and another presenting time-based
visualizations of data items. An evaluation was conducted to explore the relative
strengths and weaknesses of these two interfaces. | en |
