email skupin @ geog buffalo edu

Abstract:  As people try to cope with massive amounts of electronic infoffi1ation, browsing through very large archives can frustrate and eventually impede the retrieval of infoffi1ation. The paper presents an approach to search catalogs of very large electronic archives, that combines computer visualization with the descriptive and analytical power of geography. This method is called "spatialization ", referring to the application of spatial (and visual) metaphors for organizing large volumes of infoffi1ation that are not necessarily spatial in nature. The power of the metaphor follows from many commonly accepted geographic principles. One of these is Tobler's Law, that items closer together are more similar than items located farther apart, which is useful for categorizing 'regions ' in the catalog. Another is the concept of scale-dependence, related to the details which emerge as one observes a geographic landscape more closely. A similar hierarchy can be apparent in archive catalogs, as a person refmes a search. Other principles may also apply, for example intervisibility analysis, applicable to cross-referencing various portions of the catalog using a geographic metaphor of "line-of-sight& quot;. Previous attempts to apply spatial and particularly geographic metaphors to large archives have only partially succeeded. This is due in some part to the technique utilized to 'locate ' archive items within the confines of the metaphoric