General:Mandala Browser
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Introduction
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.
Ingredients
- An XML document, or a collection of XML documents.
Steps
- Figure out what tag in your xml file will be used as a dot in the mandala.
- Copy your xml file into the mandala directory.
- Copy the file name.
- Doubleclick the jar file to start the mandala.
- Paste the file name into the “Open” field top left.
- Type your dot tag into the “Dots Represent” field top left.
- Push the “Load” button. Dots should appear around the periphery. Large files may take a few minutes to load.
- An empty magnet is preloaded. Set up the criteria for it and watch the dots gather to it. For a free-text search on all XML fields, type the search text in the box and hit return. To narrow the search, first select an XML field from the picklist above the search box. You can also choose to see a type-ahead response while typing by clicking on the checkbox called “Search as you type.”
- Create the next magnet, and fill in its criteria.
- Iterate as necessary.
- Read items in the panel on the right by clicking them or lassoing them in the main circle.
- Export items from the reading panel for further reading.
Example
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.
Discussion
Advanced Tips
- You can use regular expressions to set up magnet values, allowing you to have several tags, for instance, attracted to a single magnet.
- You can also search on tag attributes.
Who has worked on creating it
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)
Where to read about it
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.
Availability
Download from www.humviz.org. See a demo video at www.ualberta.ca/~sruecker/mandala_demo.mov.
