The Development of a Browse and Search Interface for Metadata About Online Literary Performance in Canada During the Pandemic Period

Tomasz Neugebauer, Principal Investigator / Digital Projects & Systems Development Librarian, Concordia University Library
Francisco Berrizbeitia, Developer, Concordia University Library
Ben Joseph, Research Assistant / Full Stack Development, Simon Fraser University
Alexandre Bustamante, Research Assistant / UX Design, Concordia University
Eva Lu, Research Assistant / UX Design, Victoria University in the University of Toronto
Sukesh Gandham Research Assistant / Data Visualization, Concordia University
Jason Camlot, Principal Investigator / Professor and University Research Chair Department of English, Concordia University

The Archive of the Digital Present (ADP) for Online Literary Performance in Canada (Pandemic Period) is a browse and search interface development project that uses the Swallow Metadata Ingest System for the cataloguing and aggregation of metadata about literary events that have been forced to move online. An adapted version of metadata fields from the SpokenWeb Metadata Schema was used for the digital curation of the metadata describing literary performance events taking place online between March and December 2020. The requirements of this project motivated to some extent the development of a new version of Swallow that allows for flexibility around the metadata’s hierarchical structure. Swallow stores “Items” as belonging to “Collections” that are managed by “Partner Organizations” to the SpokenWeb research network. The ADP “archive” includes items belonging to “Collections” based on literary event Series organizers (such as Anvil Press, Argo Books, etc.). We used the Participatory Design methodology for the interface development. We hosted a series of virtual meetings with literary community partners (curators of literary events, literary scholars, SpokenWeb team members) to gather information about user needs, and the socio-technical contexts that should inform the design. The data collected during the information architecture design phase included: user surveys, results of online workshops of card sorting, tree and first-click testing. Due to the restrictions on in-person meetings, we adapted by using online tools such as Optimal Workshop. The survey identified the most important metadata elements for navigation, which also led to the decision to include custom data visualizations focusing on some of these on the top level of the site: 1) a timeline showing the number of events 2) a network visualization of adjacency relations between some of the most prolific contributors to events 3) a geographical map showing the number of events in each city. A prototype three-level information architecture was developed, and its visual look was further inspired by the sharing of team members and participants’ reflections and keywords on the experience of living through the pandemic. One of the central questions for this project was the choice of open source libraries to use as a part of the technology stack for a front-end interface for the data collected in Swallow. This would be useful for the ADP project’s data, but also as a prototype for all of the research data collected in Swallow. We had a strong preference for the publication of the source code for the front-end as open source software. The resulting prototype technology stack uses webhooks to update a Strapi headless CMS with the latest JSON data from Swallow. The Meilisearch search API is used for querying/searching Strapi’s PostgreSQL database through a frontend web interface built with Angular components. For the implementation of the data visualizations on the top level of the interface, we used Python scripting and the D3.js JavaScript library as our code base to generate Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). We added Bootstrap for responsive functionality.

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