Keywords revisited: tag clouds? better keyword browsing?
Posted: Tue Aug 18, 2009 10:52 pm
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.
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.