Software
Repertoire
Some humanities projects call for close reading of text and image; others, a rich sense of cultural context; still others use numerical methods to unearth voices hidden by history or expose larger trends. This diversity, across disciplines and between academics, stands at the center of how Hyperstudio works with individual faculty members. We seek ways to further humanistic research using appropriate digital tools—never to subordinate your research concerns to whatever digital tools are currently “in vogue.”
Chronos Timeline
HyperStudio’s Chronos Timeline is designed specifically for needs in the humanities and social sciences to represent time-based data. Chronos allows scholars and students to dynamically present historical data in a flexible online environment. Switching easily between vertical and horizontal orientations, researchers can quickly scan large number of events, highlight and filter events based on subject matter or tags, and recontextualize historical data. The Chronos Timeline is one component in HyperStudio’s emerging Repertoire platform and can easily be integrated with other tools such as faceted browsers, maps, and visualization modules.
Built in JavaScript on top of an extendable object-oriented architecture, Chronos is a flexible jQuery plug-in using the powerful jQuery library. Chronos is notable for its dynamic scaling, which allows the user to drill down into time periods to explore and compare events. Chronos connects flexibly to data sources via the JSON open standard, and will support XML data structures in a future version. Repertoire Chronos Timeline is currently in beta stage and will be released as free software under the GNU General Public License. Please feel free to try out the Chronos prototypes below. Feedback is highly welcome.
http://hs-dev.mit.edu/repertoire/chronos/
http://hs-dev.mit.edu/repertoire/chronos/vertical/
http://hs-dev.mit.edu/repertoire/chronos/horizontal/
Faceted Browser
The Repertoire faceted browser module enables you to quickly integrate non-linear search into a project. Faceted search is particularly useful when you would like to present users with multiple entry points into a dataset or when there is no expectation that they know what they are looking for beforehand. For example, someone browsing Amazon.com for a gift might have not have a specific item in mind, but instead realize theyʼre looking for something under $50 for someone who enjoys cooking and prefers red appliances. Faceted browsing allows users to explore the space of potential items by choosing the refinements in any order.
As the demo application shows, Repertoireʼs faceted browser provides a full set of features. Unlike many commercial browsers, Repertoire provides item counts for each possible result. The results display and even the facet controls can be reprogrammed to display interactive visualizations. And the system can scale to upwards of a million items with only minimal reconfiguration. Together these features place the Repertoire faceted indexer in a league with commercial products.
For more information on faceted browsing, see publications by Marti Hearst at Berkeleyʼs School of Information: http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/.
