Some Early User Scenarios

This post predates this website; it was a first attempt at writing a Project Log Blog (terrible name) for this project

I finalized the second revision of our SSHRC grant application this past weekend, and sent it to the usual suspects (who responded with encouraging noises). The new version focuses much more clearly on the prototype, on effectively putting Aldine scholarship inside the Collection, via the IIIF interface – with the effect that a scholarly essay can now become a ‘guided tour’ with direct evidence shown through the actual volumes: not pictures inside an essay, but an essay in the midst of the pictures, as it were. This in addition to ‘simply’ providing a nice, browsable IIIF interface for each book, along with a nicely arranged set of bibliographic metadata and a bit of interpretation—itself a nice bit of work for us to do.

A use case came to mind… In reading Ann Blair’s book Too Much to Know,^[1] I ran across her claim that the original paged index was in fact in the 1513 Aldine Perottus (Aldus’ second edition of Perottus), and that Aldus’ own preface in that edition boasts about it. I went online and looked at our copy of the 1513 Perottus, and immediately determined that the Preface to it is NOT the same as the preface to the 1499 edition, which is the one helpfully translated in Grant’s Humanism and the Latin Classics.^[2] Next I went to the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue and found the link to the Munich DigitiZation Center (MDZ)'s digitized copy of the 1499 – that copy definitely matches the Preface in Grant’s book. What’s the difference? Well, the 1499 edition is also a folio, is also huge (713 pages), but it is printed in Roman, and the body text is in a single column. In the 1499 edition, the page numbers are, indeed, page numbers: one per page. The 1513 is, rather, set in two columns of smaller italic (definitely a space saving, not because of the italic type but simply because two columns of smaller type), and it has column numbering, not page numbering. Both editions also feature line numbering. The index seems to be far larger in the 1513 edition – at least twice the page count, and the overall extent of the book is longer too; is the text the same, or is the 1513 actually an entirely different (bigger) edition?

This all took about half an hour to get to that last question. Imagine if we could simply pull the two IIIF manifests – one for each edition – side by side? (Imagine if I could read Latin! But that’s another challenge). BTW, our 2015 book viewer is nowhere near as nice as the MDZ’s.

At such times, questions arise about IIIF occur to me while I dream about this:

1. Could we have a manifest for a book (that is, the pages of the book, so you can browse volume) but also have a manifest for a “guided tour” (that is, pages from multiple books, ‘random access’) and allow the user to hop from one book (that is, direction of travel) to the other at will… e.g.: a tour of Aldine punctuation (let’s not forget the apostrophe, first evident in Bembo’s De Aetna), can I take such a tour as far as Gli Asolani and then ‘hop off’ and just start browsing the pages of that book instead? How do make this intersection of book-specific manifest and guided tour usable?

2. Looking at the IIIF viewers at the MDZ, and the Marciana, and the Biblioteca Europea, I notice that the basic UI is more or less the same in each: the set of icons on the sides and on the top for getting around and zooming (and the weird two-finder trackpad scroll-zoom that takes some getting used to). And I notice that the metadata display is handled in a couple of different ways: mostly, the metadata is run down the left side, and you can click through to a separate page for more detail.

   But I also like the way the Internet Archive viewer does it, with the metadata and description below (just scroll down) the viewer. That’s not bad. And, somewhere on the IIIF site (in its showcase section) there’s at least one example with a “fly-in” panel where the metadata slides in (we talked about something like that years ago, as I recall).

3. Thinking about design process: I propose (for starters) two use-cases: first, a desktop computer with a reasonably large monitor, and you run the IIIF viewer full screen (and wider than tall, because of screen aspect) for detailed examination. The laptop version of this would be the same, only smaller. Second, a mobile/phone/octavo version that’s tall and small – not just a shrunk-down version of the desktop interface. We should wireframe and paper-prototype these two use cases separately, with a different set of task/goals for each. Browsing the books on a big wide screen is a completely different kind of work than browsing the books on your phone, and the UIs we build – indeed, the way the IIIF viewers are set up – should be different, so they make sense for these two scenarios. If the phone is just a too-small version of the big version, that will suck.