Designing a User Interface for a Digital Edition
Panel
4A: Editing Jane Addams in a Digital World
Abstract
In March of 2016, Cathy Moran Hajo and I started talking about the user interface of the Jane Addams Papers Digital Edition. She and Victoriai Sciancalepore had been working with a developer to build the administrative bells and whistles they would need to manage the digital edition. With the back-end well underway, Cathy was ready to put energy into the front-end. When Cathy first contacted me, I was busy designing and developing a user interface for another Omeka-based digital edition, The Civil War Governors of Kentucky. Edited by staff at the Kentucky Historical Society, The Civil War Governors of Kentucky is a collection of historical documents associated with the five chief executives of the state, covering the years 1860-1865. I developed tools to help the Kentucky staff migrate TEI records from DocTracker, a FileMaker based editorial application, to Omeka, an open source web-publishing platform for the display of archival materials. In Omeka, the historical documents became freely available online. And the editors in Kentucky had specific goals for the presentation and discovery of these historical documents. On the heels of the Kentucky project, I began working with Cathy to create a front-end for the Jane Addams Papers Digital Edition. Initially I approached both digital edition user interfaces with the same process, developing a design brief. I will talk about the components of a design brief: identifying primary users and their site behavior, user interface goals, stylistic preferences, peer examples, content, and information architecture. While the Civil War Governors and Jane Addams design briefs shared several high level goals, the nuances of their visions differed in ways that impact how users interact with documents. From the beginning, the Jane Addams Digital Edition editors emphasized the importance of providing spatiotemporal context for documents with stylistic choices and the metadata they exposed throughout the site. Site navigation and hyperlinked metadata created branching paths for Jane Addams users to intuitively explore. On the flip-side, the Civil War Governors editors envisioned a site architecture that would guide users along linear paths from the home page to a document. I will elaborate on the different priorities of these two editorial teams, discussing how these priorities informed front-end designs and affect user experience in their respective digital editions. Finally, I will discuss genre/form differences and the trickle-down effect these differences have on the user interface of a digital edition. The Jane Addams Papers is primarily composed of correspondence (88%), while the Civil War Governors of Kentucky is divided roughly in half between correspondence (44%) and a variety of legal/financial documents (56%). The user interfaces of these two digital editions grew out of the types of documents in their collections. The user interface elements (site navigation, metadata elements, presentation of references, page layouts, etc.) support the discovery of these types of documents. For example, a researcher approaching correspondence may be interested in the relationships between people, whereas a researcher exploring petitions may be interested in dates, names, and locations. I want to note the genders of these two digital editions’ subjects. One edition focuses on the first woman to receive a Nobel Peace Prize. And the other focuses on five men, the Civil War governors of Kentucky. I’m reluctant to assert that the differences between these two user interfaces are gendered, but I am interested in the question of gender influence.
Designing a User Interface for a Digital Edition
In March of 2016, Cathy Moran Hajo and I started talking about the user interface of the Jane Addams Papers Digital Edition. She and Victoriai Sciancalepore had been working with a developer to build the administrative bells and whistles they would need to manage the digital edition. With the back-end well underway, Cathy was ready to put energy into the front-end. When Cathy first contacted me, I was busy designing and developing a user interface for another Omeka-based digital edition, The Civil War Governors of Kentucky. Edited by staff at the Kentucky Historical Society, The Civil War Governors of Kentucky is a collection of historical documents associated with the five chief executives of the state, covering the years 1860-1865. I developed tools to help the Kentucky staff migrate TEI records from DocTracker, a FileMaker based editorial application, to Omeka, an open source web-publishing platform for the display of archival materials. In Omeka, the historical documents became freely available online. And the editors in Kentucky had specific goals for the presentation and discovery of these historical documents. On the heels of the Kentucky project, I began working with Cathy to create a front-end for the Jane Addams Papers Digital Edition. Initially I approached both digital edition user interfaces with the same process, developing a design brief. I will talk about the components of a design brief: identifying primary users and their site behavior, user interface goals, stylistic preferences, peer examples, content, and information architecture. While the Civil War Governors and Jane Addams design briefs shared several high level goals, the nuances of their visions differed in ways that impact how users interact with documents. From the beginning, the Jane Addams Digital Edition editors emphasized the importance of providing spatiotemporal context for documents with stylistic choices and the metadata they exposed throughout the site. Site navigation and hyperlinked metadata created branching paths for Jane Addams users to intuitively explore. On the flip-side, the Civil War Governors editors envisioned a site architecture that would guide users along linear paths from the home page to a document. I will elaborate on the different priorities of these two editorial teams, discussing how these priorities informed front-end designs and affect user experience in their respective digital editions. Finally, I will discuss genre/form differences and the trickle-down effect these differences have on the user interface of a digital edition. The Jane Addams Papers is primarily composed of correspondence (88%), while the Civil War Governors of Kentucky is divided roughly in half between correspondence (44%) and a variety of legal/financial documents (56%). The user interfaces of these two digital editions grew out of the types of documents in their collections. The user interface elements (site navigation, metadata elements, presentation of references, page layouts, etc.) support the discovery of these types of documents. For example, a researcher approaching correspondence may be interested in the relationships between people, whereas a researcher exploring petitions may be interested in dates, names, and locations. I want to note the genders of these two digital editions’ subjects. One edition focuses on the first woman to receive a Nobel Peace Prize. And the other focuses on five men, the Civil War governors of Kentucky. I’m reluctant to assert that the differences between these two user interfaces are gendered, but I am interested in the question of gender influence.