The following are two abstracts that have been accepted for poster presentations at Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (September 22-26, Valetta, Malta). Both are abstracts for papers of four pages, which will be published in conference proceedings by Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LCNS). We will make the manuscripts available Open Access at the Erasmus University Library RePub, and will publish the eye tracking data Open Access at DANS, I’ll provide the links later on the Publications page.
Update (05-09-2013): papers and data have been published, see below.
PoliMedia
Improving Analyses of Radio, TV & Newspaper Coverage of Political Debates
Max Kemman, Martijn Kleppe
Analysing media coverage across several types of media-outlets is a challenging task for academic researchers. The PoliMedia project aimed to showcase the potential of cross-media analysis by linking the digitised transcriptions of the debates at the Dutch Parliament (Dutch Hansard) with three media-outlets: 1) newspapers in their original layout of the historical newspaper archive at the National Library, 2) radio bulletins of the Dutch National Press Agency (ANP) and 3) newscasts and current affairs programs from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. In this paper we describe generally how these links were created and we introduce the PoliMedia search user interface developed for scholars to navigate the links. In evaluation it was found that the linking algorithm had a recall of 67% and precision of 75%. Moreover, in an eye tracking evaluation we found that the interface enabled scholars to perform known-item and exploratory searches for qualitative analysis.
Eye Tracking the Use of a Collapsible Facets Panel in a Search Interface
Max Kemman, Martijn Kleppe, Jim Maarseveen
Facets can provide an interesting functionality in digital libraries. However, while some research shows facets are important, other research found facets are only moderately used. Therefore, in this exploratory study we compare two search interfaces; one where the facets panel is always visible and one where the facets panel is hidden by default. Our main research question is “Is folding the facets panel in a digital library search interface beneficial to academic users?” By performing an eye tracking study with N=24, we measured search efficiency, distribution of attention and user satisfaction. We found no significant differences in the eye tracking data nor in usability feedback and conclude that collapsing facets is neither beneficial nor detrimental.
Update 05-09-2013: papers & data published
Earlier this week the conference proceedings have been published by Springer and made available online. Interestingly enough, as the Erasmus University Rotterdam doesn’t subscribe to the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series, I don’t have access to my own papers. Today I also made the manuscripts of the papers available via our institutional repository RePub. The data for the eye tracking paper was made available earlier at DANS. See the links to all versions below.
Kemman, M., & Kleppe, M. (2013). PoliMedia – Improving Analyses of Radio, TV & Newspaper Coverage of Political Debates. In T. Aalberg et al. (Eds.), Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (pp. 401–404). Valletta, Malta: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Paper @ Springer 
| Paper @ RePub 
Kemman, M., Kleppe, M., & Maarseveen, J. (2013). Eye Tracking the Use of a Collapsible Facets Panel in a Search Interface. In T. Aalberg et al. (Eds.), Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (pp. 405-408). Valletta, Malta: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Paper @ Springer | Paper @ RePub | Data @ DANS