Pilot: Supporting Creativity in the Analysis and Understanding of Visually Complex Documents

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The project examines visually-complex documents?combination of textual and graphical elements, perhaps resulting from multiple interactions by several different people over a span of time. The approach that will be taken in this project is to enable human ingenuity through technology that helps people express, evaluate, and hypothesize about deconstructions. To accomplish this, the project will be conducted in three phases. In the first phase, we will gain an understanding of how visually-complex documents are created, used, and analyzed by scholars in multiple fields of study. This information will then be used to guide the development of a software prototype allowing manually-assisted deconstruction of these documents into their component parts, as well as allowing readers to posit structural relationships among the parts. The prototype will be placed into a research group and its use will be evaluated in the third phase.The pilot work for this research will focus on scholars working with cultural heritage materials. While the need to interact with visually complex documents is commonplace, it is particularly pressing in the domain of cultural heritage. They will work specifically with the Ship Reconstruction Lab, part of the Center for Maritime Archaeology at Texas A&M University. Archaeology is a discipline that draws on research from a wide range of academic disciplines, both STEM and humanistic. This fact makes it a particularly useful area to study in order to develop models and tools that will be relevant for the needs of people in many different disciplines. Visually complex documents are a central component of almost all areas of scholarship and enterprise, including science, engineering, business, arts, and humanities?almost all researchers and practitioners deal with documents that include spatially significant elements such as text, sketches, annotations, shorthand, and personal or shared visual notations. The spatial arrangement of text and graphical elements contribute to the document?s meaning in conjunction with the actual words or images of the document. These relationships are often visually apparent to a reader, but their actual presentation does not represent them because the elements must be flattened to be displayed on a two dimensional surface (physical or digital). The ability to directly express and manipulate their previously-lost structure?in other words to decompose the document into its constituent parts?is required for understanding or to enable analysis. Such decompositions may be spatial, temporal, or may reflect other characteristics. Significantly, it is not always clear how a document is best decomposed. This task is a creative process that requires support for alternate deconstructions and re-constructions of lost intermediate forms of the document. During this analysis, understanding will emerge as the analyst iteratively expresses different potential information layers and interacts with those expressions.