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<li>Try to find the text of all passages in Romeo and Juliet in which the words "love" and "hate" are both mentioned.</li> | <li>Try to find the text of all passages in Romeo and Juliet in which the words "love" and "hate" are both mentioned.</li> | ||
<li>Try moving the objects in the mandala around and zooming in and out.</li> | <li>Try moving the objects in the mandala around and zooming in and out.</li> | ||
+ | </ol> | ||
==Discussion== | ==Discussion== |
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Contents |
It allows you to do fairly sophisticated visual browsing of any XML document or collection of documents. Parts of documents or entire documents appear as dots around the periphery. You create colourful magnets and assign values to them. These magnets draw the dots into the centre space. There is a text viewer off to the right, so you can see what is inside any given dot. You can also export what you find for later study.
You might be interested in the question: do women writers who have children write less than women writers without children? To address this question, you could load the Orlando collection, and make each dot represent a woman writer. Create magnets 0-9 representing numbers of children. You see immediately that there are diminishing numbers of women writers for each number of children, but there are some writers for every number. However, maybe the ones with more children wrote less. So you create new magnets dealing with measures of prolixity, by looking at the author summary tag, which summarizes a writer’s achievements, for the words “prolific” or “numerous” or “many.” It appears that by these measures, having more children equates to being more prolific. Now the third step is to access the documents, either by export or by logging into Orlando, to pursue further details.
A screencast explaining how to use Mandala is here: http://www.ualberta.ca/~sruecker/mandala_demo.mov
Mandala was developed with funding from SSHRC by Stefan Sinclair, Anthony Sapp, Matt Patey (McMaster University), Stan Ruecker, Oksana Cheypesh, Constanza Pacher, Rhiannon Gainor (University of Alberta), Sandra Gabriele (York University)
Brown, Susan, Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy, Stan Ruecker, Jeffery Antoniuk, Sharon Balazs, Stéfan Sinclair and Matt Patey. “Thinking Beyond the Text: Using the Mandala Browser to Explore Orlando.” Paper presented at the Society for Digital Humanities/ Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs annual conference at the 2008 Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, University of British Columbia. June 2-3, 2008.
Gainor, Rhiannon, Stéfan Sinclair, Stan Ruecker, Matt Patey, and Sandra Gabriele. [Forthcoming]. “A Mandala Browser User Study: Visualizing XML Versions of Shakespeare’s Plays.” Visible Language 43(1). 2009.
Ruecker, Stan. “Experimental Interfaces Involving Visual Grouping During Browsing.” Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research. 1(1). 2006.
Download from www.humviz.org. See a demo video at www.ualberta.ca/~sruecker/mandala_demo.mov.