Exploring
The Alpha Prototype is ready for Throwing Bones is now online. Conceived of by Uszkalo as a way to visualize the pattens in witchcraft texts, Throwing Bones allows the user to select a number of texts, a number of classifications, then search for results in the clusters. An example might be to look at witch's familiars and see what patterns emerge across time or located by geography. The interface design for Throwing Bones is based on the idea of using tarot cards and 'throwing bones' as methods to predict and interpret. Each card represents an element of the text, such as a witch, familiar, or which has been classified and can be retrieved as an object. In "throwing bones," users can look for specific elements in a text collection, and visualize how they function in single texts, or across larger data sets. The results will be shown visually, as representational objects on the screen. This kind of interaction will allow users to deal with the texts simultaneously on multiple levels (pick up, move around, drop), and allow the texts to speak back, telling a kind of story which might otherwise remain obscure under the auspices of standard, date, author, and keyword search terms. The personalized approach used by Throwing Bones is supported by the findings of Appan, Sundaram, and Birchfield (2004) whose project in creating personalized narrative for everyday experiences illustrated that creating meaning from these experiences "requires active participation by the user." The structure of the narrative "emerges from the user's interaction, rather than from the structure in the presentation," required a "dynamic presentation environment that allowed viewers of the story control," and ultimately "required a new framework that was interactive, user friendly as well as exploratory" (2004). The information conjured from the texts by researchers using an exploratory personalized interaction promises to be more meaningful than those from standardized approaches. This approach is not unlike personal, or collaborative tagging systems emergent on the net which "extend beyond the traditional objectives of subject access," express "a dynamic relationship between document and user, and between subject and task," and which "may lead to new ways of modeling subject access" (Kipp and Campbell 2006). Through the use of visual narrative, Throwing Bones will allow a dynamic, visual, and tactile personalized organization of information about witchcraft unattainable through standardized search strings.
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