Browsing by Subject "visualisation"

Cultural Heritage (CH) collections, data, and artefacts used to be available mainly in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM). Due to digitisation, huge collections of CH data are now available online. Since the appearance of these data online, CH data have been searched, analysed and presented using various methods and visualisations. However, many of these methods do not take adequate advantage of the nature of CH data. Even when the CH data dimensions are utilised, the choices of visualisation sometimes fall short. This thesis is a part of the Finnish Archaeological Finds Recording Linked Open Database (SuALT) project. The project aims to develop digital Web services to cater for archaeological finds made by members of the public, especially metal detectorists through ‘citizen science’. Therein, a portion of an innovative prototype that tries to enable serendipitous knowledge discovery by making searching and visualising CH data seamless is presented. The artefact would serve as part of the basis of the FindSampo portal. The prototype is not implemented from scratch, but it is based on the Sampo model, the Sampo-UI framework and several third-party libraries and visualisations. The prototype includes mainly a user-centric faceted search engine, keyword searches to filter the facet options. It also includes data-analytic tools for visualising the filtered data on a table, a timeline chart, pie chart, line chart, maps and an option to export the results in CSV form for further analysis in external tools. However, this thesis focuses on the faceted search engine and the timeline visualisation that presents the spatio-temporal nature of the SuALT data. The portion of the prototype was evaluated based on three principles: serendipity, generosity, and criticality. And the result of the user experience survey suggests that the prototype could provide a good starting point to explore the find collection, make access to individual find information easier, improves the serendipitous discovery of archaeological find data and also make the find data analysis and interpretation easier.