Browse, search and serendipity: building approachable digital editions

Large digital document collections ideally provide multiple routes into data imagined for different users and different use-cases: thematic and hierarchical (drill-down) browsability for casual users, and precisely-targeted complex search functionality to answer granular queries and generate subcollections for specific research purposes. Responding to recent critical work on digital editions and periodical print surrogates (e.g. Mussell 2012, 2016; Gooding), and on the visual interface as a form of graphic knowledge (Drucker), this chapter will examine the challenges in building a big tent digital project that anticipates users’ needs.  

The Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project (DVPP) has a particular interest in responding to this challenge, which is complicated by the nature of its own collection. The project’s methodological principles are based on poetry’s place on the  periodical page, from the inclusion of periodical poem page scans (facsimile browser, poem page rendering), to the indexing protocols (designed around how contemporary periodical readers would understand poems and their illustrations), to encoding a representative sample of poems based on decadal years from 1820 to 1900 (including material as well as poetic features). But our approach to the front end application (facsimile browser, poem page rendering, index of poems and personography, digital edition, advanced search pages) is based around offering the user multiple ways to search and find material that moves away from the poem’s embedded periodical print origins, and even the conceptual and functional principles of the codex, to allow for complex and serendipitous discovery. The challenge of this digital project is to relate the project’s indexing and encoding principles to users’ anticipated research, particularly given the relationship between the index (c.15,500 poems across 21 long Victorian periodicals), personography (c.4,000 records for poets, illustrators and translators), and the TEI XML- encoded poem sample (c.2,000 poems and c. 11,000 lines of poetry). 

This chapter examines relationships between the underlying metadata and text-encoding, as well as the affordances DVPP will eventually offer the end-user. We conclude by offering guidelines based on building search interfaces that are useful to researchers. Firstly, we address practical problems. Enlarging project features can make interfaces potentially confusing, and expanding interdependencies can also produce incompatible features. Workflow is crucial: user discoverability is contingent on encoding, and yet predicting search parameters is contingent on a good understanding of data that only emerges as the project advances. We suggest a workflow where metadata structures and labels can be trivially revised, with the search and browse interfaces automatically adapted to such changes. Secondly, we turn to the conceptual imagining of the anticipated user, by comparing DVPP with cognate digital editions and commercial indexes and digital surrogates (such as those owned by ProQuest), to ask how digital editions can guide users to engage critically and actively with multiple methods of browse, search, and serendipitous discovery, rather than approaching search functionality as simply a means to an end.