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Probably because interface technology did not support rich graphical
presentations and pointing devices until late in the development of
computer science, the human-computer interface (HCI) is often an
after-thought in software engineering. This bias remains today in search
engine designs which assume the indexing and match algorithms can be
separated from the presentation of result [Harman92b] [REF654] .
Sometimes interface design is
approached as a data visualization task [Veerasamy96] . Korfage VIBE
presentation [Korfhage95]
highlights a user and author's perspectives on topical areas. Rather
than assuming that there is any absolute, preferred perspective on
keywords, Korfage considers what the words look like from the
perspective of users and authors, respectively.
In terms of the vector
space model, we can think of these as projections. The huge dimensional
space of keywords, or even the still large reduced dimension
representation, is still far more than we can visualize on the two
dimensional computer screen. We can try to impose other dimensions (e.g.
color, size) but still we must pick some projected subspace of the
larger data set. Norman and Schneiderman have written extensively on the
design of interfaces which are deeply connected to the user's underlying
task [Norman88] [Shneiderman92] ; Marchianoni has
focused particularly on interfaces for the ``information seeking'' task
[Marchionini95] . As part of
the Xerox PARC group, Hearst has explored a number of visualization
techniques (cf. Figure (FOAref) ); she has also recently
provided an extensive survey of interface technologies [Hearst99] .
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