Expedition: A Time-Aware Exploratory Search System Designed for Scholars

TL;DR

Expedition is a specialized time-aware search system designed for scholars, offering advanced retrieval, comparison tools, and interactive timelines to support complex research needs in archives.

Contribution

The paper introduces Expedition, a novel scholarly-focused exploratory search system with diverse retrieval models and interactive features tailored for academic research.

Findings

Enhanced retrieval models improve search relevance for scholars.

Interactive timeline aids in identifying key historical periods.

User interface supports detailed comparison and refinement of results.

Abstract

Archives are an important source of study for various scholars. Digitization and the web have made archives more accessible and led to the development of several time-aware exploratory search systems. However these systems have been designed for more general users rather than scholars. Scholars have more complex information needs in comparison to general users. They also require support for corpus creation during their exploration process. In this paper we present Expedition - a time-aware exploratory search system that addresses the requirements and information needs of scholars. Expedition possesses a suite of ad-hoc and diversity based retrieval models to address complex information needs; a newspaper-style user interface to allow for larger textual previews and comparisons; entity filters to more naturally refine a result list and an interactive annotated timeline which can be used to better identify periods of importance.