Discoverability and the Problems of Access: Thoughts on Responsive Digital-Research Interfacing

If we imagine the digital repository as a vast ocean of letters, words, phrases, and images, then the search box is the lighthouse that focuses its beam, however briefly, in particular directions. The search box enables finding, but not querying; it does not allow the reader to focus its lens or cast out to the shore with her own boat. When it comes to digital research, the search box is still the primary point of entry, and I would like to suggest that the digital periodical archive might enable a type of research that takes into account questions of access related to what I’m calling discoverability. Other scholars, including contributors to this forum, do right to acknowledge the limitations of the digital archive in terms of representation, accessibility, and inclusion. Here, I would like to address the question of access in the context of research interface design and the problem of responsiveness.

This problem emerged for me when I began to engage in periodical research for a project on nineteenth-century American and Atlantic foodways. My goal was to track the language of food within periodicals, paying particular attention to the emergence and circulation of recipes. In particular, I was interested in conversations about food, especially recipes, in order to consider how cultures and communities of taste are formed and disseminated throughout the Atlantic. I developed a broad research question: “What is the language of food in nineteenth-century American periodicals?” I then turned to the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America to find content to examine.

Although I had in mind specific items I hoped to find—recipes and domestic articles about cake-making and sugar production, for example—my particular approach was more about exploring the archive. That is, in my early stage of research, I went into the digital archive with a heavy reliance on search functionality.

Digitization at times presents itself as an enticing cure-all to the problems associated with scholarly research. With reliable access to an archive—as well as the ability to both browse at one’s leisure and home in on a particular keyword—research has become, ostensibly, more efficient. Understudied texts are accessed and read by undergraduates. Big-data analysts tell new stories about the content by mining data and creating maps and other visualizations. Researchers now undertake periodical research with renewed vigor and are able to trace networks of content and authors across multiple newspapers. The content of Chronicling America, or any digitized periodical collection, is obviously a boon to researchers who can now access, read, and study materials once only available in a physical archive. Like the physical/analog archive, researchers can browse, store, and retrieve content from the digital repository. It is the practice of “browsing” or “searching” (or what I refer to as “discovering” or the discoverability of digital research) that I want to focus on here. Discoverability is both related to and a departure from keyword search, a method that is often limited in its ability to locate objects of analysis.

To think through the goals of digital research is to imagine its design in what Jerome McGann has called the “future perfect tense.”¹ The truth is, issues of discoverability and responsiveness remain even after digitization—and they must become part of our broader definition of access. I use these two terms as a means to enter into a larger conversation about what it means for the researcher to do digital research: what are the affordances and limitations of the interfaces we use to perform digital research, and how might we rethink them to support meaningful research practices?

Returning to my own research project, I developed and documented my keyword search terms, which included:

• ○ cake

• ○ wedding cake

• ○ sugar

• ○ recipe

• ○ receipt

• ○ breakfast

• ○ kitchen

• ○ Jamaica + cookery

• ○ West Indies / West Indian

• ○ candy

• ○ Godey’s Lady’s Book

• ○ Thanksgiving

• ○ cookbooks

• ○ salt

To better achieve the types of results I was hoping for, I continuously refined my searching: I combined phrases and searched for recurring domesticity or advice columns. I added qualifiers like “new,” or “favorite,” to the...