Keywords revisited: tag clouds? better keyword browsing?

[rickl]

I’d like to reopen the discussion on the keywords term list. An earlier discussion
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2264&st=0&sk=t&sd=a ... ts&start=0
was interesting, but I and other users failed to generate any ideas specific enough to give Jon a clear idea of where our problems lay. So I’ll kick off with some more-or-less specific suggestions (not all of which are necessarily compatible with each other), which hopefully other users will refine/ridicule.

1. Resizable Keyword Pane.
First off a small thing: In order to make long keywords visible while viewing references on the righthand pane, I’d like the width of the lefthand pane to be resettable by dragging, and I’d like the maximum possible width to be much wider than it is now. (I know that I can resize by clicking the disclosure triangle to make references invisible; I’d like to be able to resize without doing this.)

(Now for some slightly more radical ideas...)

2. Keyword Filter.
I think some way of filtering the keywords list is desirable. For example, some of my keywords are “cognitive flexibility”, “cognitive presence”, “cognitive engagement”, “cognition”, and “cognitive domains”. I’d like to be able to type in “cognit” somewhere and see all of these but none of the others. An example of this kind of thing in action can be seen at CiteULike. If you visit my library at http://www.citeulike.org/user/rickl and type “cognit” into the Filter on the right, you’ll see all and only my tags that have this string. (This is really useful in making clear my unproductive tags so that I can prune them.) This would be even more useful if the display of references on the left (on the right in the case of Bookends) updated to show only references that had at least one of these tags. I wouldn’t really expect this in the case of a web app, but think it’s a reasonable expectation in a Mac OS X application.

3. Finder Column View.
As things stand, if I want to view all my references with “academic blogging” AND “usability” as keywords, this is in principle easy enough to do. But it involves a lot of scrolling through a long list of keywords. This assumes that I’ve decided in advance which keywords I want to find the intersection of. Thus, it is more akin to search than to exploratory browsing. Imagine instead that I click on one keyword, e.g. “weblogs”, in the lefthand pane. As happens now, in the rightmost pane, Bookends displays the 172 references that have that keyword. But in another pane immediately to the right of the leftmost pane, Bookends also displays all the other keywords that any of those 172 references also has. In my case, those would include “collaboration”, “journals”, “web publishing”, “online communities”, and so on. In this second column, let’s say I click on “online communities”. Now, in the reference list on the right, I can see all and only the references that have both keywords (assuming of course I’m in AND mode). At the same time, a third keyword column opens up, showing all the keywords that have been applied to any of the references in the second column. In this way, I can drill down through my references, narrowing in on the ones that interest me. Importantly, Bookends is actively helping me do this, rather than requiring me to specify from the outset exactly what I want to find. Note that, although I’ve called this “Finder Column View”, the Finder’s column view is designed to help us navigate a hierarchy, while with Bookends keywords there is no true hierarchy: choosing “online communities” in the first column followed by “weblogs” in the second would give me the same results as the reverse.

4. Keyword Cloud Display.
Clicking on the disclosure triangle makes the references disappear (just as it does now) and also reveals a List/Cloud toggle. Clicking on Cloud expands the Term List window to take up the whole screen and reveals ALL your keywords without the necessity of scrolling, with a visual indication of which keywords are common (typically by size, but an alternative would be for a tooltip-style number of occurrences to appear as the mouse hovers over a keyword). An alternative, probably better, would be for the disclosure triangle to make the lefthand pane wide and the righthand pane narrow but still visible. So if I click on a keyword in Cloud view, I see a list of all the references that have that keyword. If I Shift-Click (for example) on a second keyword, the references with both keywords are displayed on the right. If I Control-Click anywhere in the keyword cloud, all the selections are undone and all my references are listed on the right. If I Command-Click on any keywords, references that have those keywords are excluded from the list on the right.

5. Write Keywords to OpenMeta Tags.
Reference items are probably the first things on our Macs to which we attached keywords. It’s ironic that they’ve become second-class citizens now that it’s possible to add/read tags (often through the OpenMeta proto-standard) to/of pretty much any item on our Macs (including email messages and Safari bookmarks) except references, using software like Leap, EagleFiler, Default Folder, and so on. Perhaps Bookends keywords could become OpenMeta tags automatically. Or perhaps there could be a new OpenMeta Tags field in Bookends that would open itself to OpenMeta searching. Getting really ambitious, perhaps Bookends could actually write OpenMeta Tags to a reference’s attachments so that OpenMeta could find files associated with a reference that has a specific keyword.

6. Write Bookends Keywords to Spotlight Comments.
This might be a more practical alternative to 5. Presumably it would be best if these had a specific prefix so that we could search for, e.g., +”online communities” to find only Bookends references with “online communities” as a keyword, or “online communities” to get Bookends references plus other items that meet that criterion.

Finally, I’d like to note that I’ve changed my view again on the status of keywords: I now agree with aechallu from the earlier discussion that keywords, as things that, by and large, we assign to our data ourselves, are of special importance beyond that of journals and authors. (That doesn’t necessarily mean, of course, that the same capabilities shouldn’t be extended to other types of term lists.)

There are lots of other ways to enable interaction with keywords, and a look at the ways in which software like Leap, Yep, and Webbla do this would be instructive. Hopefully, people interested in this kind of thing will take the time to chime in again. My own feeling at present is that 3 might be the most promising way to go: it’s radical enough to realise a major leap in usefulness of the keywords term list, while being sufficiently rooted in Bookends’ existing interface conventions to be (possibly) acceptable to all and consistent with Jon’s vision of what Bookends should and shouldn’t be.

[ozean]

Nice list! No. 1 and 2 would be important updates for me. I think some cloud-thingy would be nice too. (Not sure how useful/necessary, but surely nice – though I guess the usefulness depends on how many references you have in your database: the more, the better.)

[rickl]

For some interesting ideas on how data visualization can help with finding and managing references, take a look at PaperCube. Amazing!
http://papercube.peterbergstrom.com/

[Jon]

Hi, you'll find improvements in the Term List window in the next update. I've come up with what I think is a nicer solution for request #3 -- only one column or terms is shown, but you can temporarily "pin" terms so that they can't be deselected (unless you "unpin" them). In this way you can aggregate terms for boolean operations. In addition, the actual boolean search is shown, so you don't have to guess at what the search is.

Jon
Sonny Software

[rickl]

Thanks for responding to this. The "pinning" approach sounds interesting; I'll look forward to seeing it.

[rickl]

Since menu organization is being discussed elsewhere, I'd like to reopen the debate about the right place for keyword management. When I said something to the same effect in an earlier discussion, I was asked for concrete suggestions and was unable to give any. I'm afraid that's still pretty much the case, but I do feel that Term Lists is not an immediately understandable term for non-techies, and also that keyword browsing is a key activity that should be brought to the fore in some way. At present, I feel that Bookends allows rather than facilitates it, and I suspect that the same is true of some other activities.

Removing venerable menus like Font and Style is something not to be done lightly, but I must say that I haven't used them in Bookends for a long time. Getting rid of them would make room for the Cite menu suggested in the other discussion, and perhaps an Explore menu (or perhaps call it Surf Metadata if you want to appeal to the Web 2.0/hippy crossover generation).

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2411&start=15&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

[aechallu]

I think the tag cloud is an interesting concept, and more broadly anything that allows the user to discover how tags are clustered, and to search through keywords. I look forward to the see the changes Jon introduced.

The suggestion to automatically add keywords to attachments is perfect. (I'm not familiar with metatags, so I can't comment on that.)

On menu reorganization, I agree that it can't be done lightly and it would require not only Jon's support but also a lot of user testing and input to see whether there's improvement in real-life use. My impression, though, is that it is needed as the new features have overcrowded the old menus.

[Jon]

Actually, I don't think it has to be very crowded. There will be a new menu option below Copy Citation: Edit -> Copy Citation And Modifiers. It will bring up a dialog box that let's you enter cited pages (already populated with selected text from the reference window, if any), text to place in front of the citation, and any special conditions (date-only, exclude from bibliography, etc.).

I'd also like to point out, in case it's not obvious, that the Term Lists also contain how many times a term has been used. This column can be sorted numerically by clicking on the header, so it's easy to see what the most commonly-used terms are (it's not a graphic, but it is still informative).

As for Term Lists, let's see how the new features that are coming in then next update serve. I have ideas for more changes, but they would come only in a major update.

Jon
Sonny Software

[rickl]

For anyone puzzled by the very long post with which I started this thread, or doubtful whether they would want to "drill down" through their keywords to explore their references… Today I heard that Yojimbo had been updated and I think its implementation is a pretty good example of the approach that I'm talking about:
http://www.barebones.com/products/yojim ... lorer.html

[Indi]

I've just come back to Bookends after a hiatus using (clears throat) other bib/pdf software, and am really thrilled with the improvements. The tag cloud is very useful, and the ability to put collections in folders is a winner (at least I don't remember that being there a couple years ago). I have a couple of questions/suggestions about tags and keywords.

1) Keywords: It took me some searching to find where these were hidden. I wonder why they aren't one of the options in "View"? I would like to switch from having groups & collections in the left pane to having keywords (or authors/journals/etc.). In fact, I'd like to be able to toggle the word "groups" (top of left pane) and choose any of those options. This seems easier than having a separate window. Is there some functionality that other people find in having the 2 separate windows?

2) The keyword pinning is nice. Feature suggestion: When I click a keyword, and then click one of the resulting entries, all that item's other keywords should become highlighted, in a different color (lighter grey?) than is used on the original keyword. (Note: Similarly, this would be a great thing in the main window: when I select an item, all the collections it's in should be highlighted.) This is one of the features that's making it difficult to leave BibDesk.

3) Tag cloud: This is one of the reasons I'm leaving BibDesk! Fantastic. 2 needs:
a) The user manual says you can edit the list of terms to be ignored by the cloud. How? There's no option in preferences to add or subtract or edit the list. Suggestion: There should be an option to do so in preferences, BUT ALSO what about a contextual menu option? I would like to right-click on a tag right in the cloud itself, and select "Add this tag to 'ignore' list" or somesuch. That would make it sooooo easy.

b) Is there some way to get the cloud to recognize combination terms? For instance, if I have the term "New York", I don't want to see "new" and "york" separately in the cloud. I tried putting curly brackets around terms like that, but it didn't affect it. Is there some other method? If not, could there please be?

Thanks you very much!

[Jon]

1) Keywords: It took me some searching to find where these were hidden. I wonder why they aren't one of the options in "View"? I would like to switch from having groups & collections in the left pane to having keywords (or authors/journals/etc.). In fact, I'd like to be able to toggle the word "groups" (top of left pane) and choose any of those options. This seems easier than having a separate window. Is there some functionality that other people find in having the 2 separate windows?

Hi,

Welcome back.

If by "View" you mean the concise view on the right, you can view the keywords of any reference easily (you can configure that view). If you mean you'd like Term Lists to display there (or on the left where groups are), that sounds like an idea I've been toying with. It would not be simple to implement, but is something to think about.

2) The keyword pinning is nice. Feature suggestion: When I click a keyword, and then click one of the resulting entries, all that item's other keywords should become highlighted, in a different color (lighter grey?) than is used on the original keyword. (Note: Similarly, this would be a great thing in the main window: when I select an item, all the collections it's in should be highlighted.) This is one of the features that's making it difficult to leave BibDesk.

Hm, not sure what you're asking for. In the Term List, you click on one term (e.g. cardiomyopathy). What do you want to happen?

BTW, in the List View, if you select a reference and then hold down the Shift and Option keys, Bookends will highlight any groups that the reference belongs to in yellow. I think that's what you asked for in the second part.

3) Tag cloud: This is one of the reasons I'm leaving BibDesk! Fantastic. 2 needs:
a) The user manual says you can edit the list of terms to be ignored by the cloud. How? There's no option in preferences to add or subtract or edit the list.

Yes there is. Preferences -> Tags

Suggestion: There should be an option to do so in preferences, BUT ALSO what about a contextual menu option? I would like to right-click on a tag right in the cloud itself, and select "Add this tag to 'ignore' list" or somesuch. That would make it sooooo easy.

That's a very good idea. Thanks.

b) Is there some way to get the cloud to recognize combination terms? For instance, if I have the term "New York", I don't want to see "new" and "york" separately in the cloud. I tried putting curly brackets around terms like that, but it didn't affect it. Is there some other method? If not, could there please be?

If the tag cloud is showing Authors, Editors, or Keywords, the tags can be phrases, like "New York". For plain text fields (e.g. Notes, Abstract, Title) it's individual words. There is no good way to implement terms for these fields. Note that if you want to restrict the search to "New York", you'd click on one and then click on the other with the Shift or Command key held down. That would select both and give you a search for "New York".

Jon
Sonny Software

[Indi]

If you mean you'd like Term Lists to display there (or on the left where groups are), that sounds like an idea I've been toying with. It would not be simple to implement, but is something to think about.

Yes--I meant on the left, where groups are. I imagined that one could toggle an arrow (for instance) by the word "groups" and choose to display term lists instead.

Feature suggestion: When I click a keyword, and then click one of the resulting entries, all that item's other keywords should become highlighted, in a different color (lighter grey?) than is used on the original keyword. (Note: Similarly, this would be a great thing in the main window: when I select an item, all the collections it's in should be highlighted.)

Hm, not sure what you're asking for. In the Term List, you click on one term (e.g. cardiomyopathy). What do you want to happen?

BTW, in the List View, if you select a reference and then hold down the Shift and Option keys, Bookends will highlight any groups that the reference belongs to in yellow. I think that's what you asked for in the second part.

That's exactly what I meant, in both cases. After I wrote the first post, I found the shift-option feature. I'm used to that happening in BibDesk automatically, without having to do a key combination. Very useful visually.

a) The user manual says you can edit the list of terms to be ignored by the cloud. How? There's no option in preferences to add or subtract or edit the list.

Yes there is. Preferences -> Tags

In the prefs tab, I see the list of tags that are ignored, and I see a place to select color and font size. But there is nothing that says "add", or has +/- symbols, or that is a field to type in. What am I missing? Here's a picture of what I see in prefs:

Tag_Prefs.png (80.42 KiB) Viewed 15335 times

what about a contextual menu option? I would like to right-click on a tag right in the cloud itself, and select "Add this tag to 'ignore' list" or somesuch. That would make it sooooo easy.

That's a very good idea. Thanks.

Super!

Is there some way to get the cloud to recognize combination terms? For instance, if I have the term "New York", I don't want to see "new" and "york" separately in the cloud.

If the tag cloud is showing Authors, Editors, or Keywords, the tags can be phrases, like "New York". For plain text fields (e.g. Notes, Abstract, Title) it's individual words. There is no good way to implement terms for these fields. Note that if you want to restrict the search to "New York", you'd click on one and then click on the other with the Shift or Command key held down. That would select both and give you a search for "New York".

OK, I see.

Thank you very much! Super support as always.

[Jon]

In the prefs tab, I see the list of tags that are ignored, and I see a place to select color and font size. But there is nothing that says "add", or has +/- symbols, or that is a field to type in. What am I missing? Here's a picture of what I see in prefs:

It's a textbox that you can type in. Enter your word(s), one per line, and Bookends will exclude them when it makes a tag cloud from the Title, Notes, and/or Abstract fields.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Jon]

Yes--I meant on the left, where groups are. I imagined that one could toggle an arrow (for instance) by the word "groups" and choose to display term lists instead.

There is a downside to that. One of the nice features of the Term Lists is that you can easily insert terms into a reference by clicking a button or drag and drop. That would not be possible if the Term Lists were integrated into the List View window.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Jon]

After I wrote the first post, I found the shift-option feature. I'm used to that happening in BibDesk automatically, without having to do a key combination. Very useful visually.

To show it all the time or on demand is a design decision. I for one don't need to know to which groups a reference belongs all the time, and would find it distracting to have group highlighting change every time I selected a reference or did a search. When I do want to know, pressing Shift-Option shows me. In the end, both do the same job.

Jon
Sonny Software