Rich Prospect Browser for Studying Interface Design

During the first 3 years of the INKE project, the Interface Design team gathered several hundred images of print and digital reading environments in our environmental study of citations, corpora and scholarly editions. These images run from screen shots of digital editions to details scanned from print editions. We assembled them to be able to study and compare interfaces to knowledge environments. The number and variety has now surpassed our ability to use this collection for study, which has led us to organize these image files into a manageable database that affords easy search, retrieval and visual comparison. The interface to the database is a member of a family of rich-prospect browsers developed over time for a wide range of purposes (Ruecker et al., 2011). This interface has the advantage that it encourages visual comparison across different examples based on meta-data. A user can, for example, see all the images that show running headers or some other feature.