Overview Visualizations for Large Digitized Correspondence Collections: A Design Study

Abstract

Overview visualization is a useful alternative to search engines in digital libraries. We describe such a tool in the context of a large correspondence collection: the Godin-Moret archive (20,000 letters). After a review of previous works, we describe our interface design and how it has been derived with the help of an online co-creation workshop. The interface is organized with a specific representation called the correspondence matrix, coordinated with more standard visualizations like tag clouds, maps and bar graphs.