Max Kemman

The debates of the European Parliament as Linked Open Data

The European Parliament represents the citizens of the member states of the European Union (EU). The accounts of its meetings and related documents are open data, promoting transparency and accountability, and are used as source data by researchers. However, the official portal of these documents provides limited search facilities. This paper presents LinkedEP, a Linked Open Data translation of the verbatim reports of the plenary meetings of the European Parliament. These data are integrated with a database of political affiliations of the Members of Parliament, and enriched with detected topics from the EUs topic hierarchy and links to four other Linked Open Datasets. The results of this work are available through a SPARQL endpoint and a user interface with extensive browse and search facilities. It is now possible to combine in one query the time and topic of the debate, the spoken words - in any available translation - and information about the speaker uttering these, such as affiliations to countries, parties and committees. This paper discusses the design and creation of the vocabulary, data and links, as well as known use of the data.

Eye Tracking the Use of a Collapsible Facets Panel in a Search Interface

Facets can provide an interesting functionality in digital libraries. However, while some research shows facets are important, other research found facets are only moderately used. Therefore, in this exploratory study we compare two search interfaces; one where the facets panel is always visible and one where the facets panel is hidden by default. Our main research question is “Is folding the facets panel in a digital library search interface beneficial to academic users?” By performing an eye tracking study with N=24, we measured search efficiency, distribution of attention and user satisfaction. We found no significant differences in the eye tracking data nor in usability feedback and conclude that collapsing facets is neither beneficial nor detrimental.

PoliMedia - Improving Analyses of Radio, TV & Newspaper Coverage of Political Debates

textabstractAbstract. Analysing media coverage across several types of media-outlets is a challenging task for academic researchers. The PoliMedia project aimed to showcase the potential of cross-media analysis by linking the digitised transcriptions of the debates at the Dutch Parliament (Dutch Hansard) with three media-outlets: 1) newspapers in their original layout of the historical newspaper archive at the National Library, 2) radio bulletins of the Dutch National Press Agency (ANP) and 3) newscasts and current affairs programs from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. In this paper we describe generally how these links were created and we introduce the PoliMedia search user interface developed for scholars to navigate the links. In evaluation it was found that the linking algorithm had a recall of 67% and precision of 75%. Moreover, in an eye tracking evaluation we found that the interface enabled scholars to perform known-item and exploratory searches for qualitative analysis.

Talking with Scholars: Developing a Research Environment for Oral History Collections

Scholars are yet to make optimal use of Oral History collections. For the uptake of digital research tools in the daily working practice of researchers, practices and conventions commonly adhered to in the subfields of the humanities should be taken into account during development, in order to facilitate the uptake of digital research tools in the daily working practice of researchers. To this end, in the Oral History Today project a research tool for exploring Oral History collections is developed in close collaboration with scholarly researchers. This paper describes four stages of scholarly research and the first steps undertaken to incorporate requirements of these stages in a digital research environment.

AXES-RESEARCH — A user-oriented tool for enhanced multimodal search and retrieval in audiovisual libraries

AXES, Access for Audiovisual Archives, is a research project developing tools for new engaging ways to interact with audiovisual libraries, integrating advanced audio and video analysis technologies. The presented prototype is targeted at academic researchers and journalists. The tool allows them to search and retrieve video segments through metadata, audio analysis, as well as visual concepts and similarity searches. Presented here is a user-based vision on the research-oriented tool provided by AXES.