The Empirical Humanist

When one works in an area — it doesn’t mat­ter whether it’s in the human­i­ties or in build­ing con­struc­tion — one begins to rec­og­nize pat­terns in how prob­lems are solved. Typ­i­cal solu­tions accrue as a body of knowl­edge and are passed on to new practitioners.

In com­puter sci­ence this has been hap­pen­ing for a decade or more. “Design pat­terns”, soft­ware con­structs which have both data struc­tures and the algo­rithms to effi­ciently and effec­tively manip­u­late them, are becom­ing more and more well-​​known and well under­stood. For exam­ple, there is the “fac­tory” pat­tern, which makes “wid­gets”, defined by the pro­gram­mer. This is a com­mon task, so com­mon that it has been done many times. The gen­eral prin­ci­ples of how to con­struct a fac­tory are described, regard­less of the soft­ware plat­form or environment.

The idea of design pat­terns can be extended, and the folks at Endeca have done just that for user inter­faces (UI): the Endeca User Inter­face Design Pat­tern Library. There is no rea­son the rein­vent the wheel; this library deals with com­mon tasks or prob­lems in pro­gram­ming a UI, e.g., search, faceted nav­i­ga­tion, and infor­ma­tion dis­cov­ery. There are other UI design pat­tern libraries out there, e.g., Pat­ternry.

Why my inter­est in this? Because Patrick Durusau and I are exper­i­ment­ing with new ways of inter-​​acting with text, using the rab­binic Miqra’ot Gedolot (the Rab­binic Bible; kind of like a medieval Jew­ish “study Bible”) as a point of depar­ture for design con­cepts. We are play­ing around with var­i­ous ways of map­ping rab­binic ideas of text study to mod­ern UI con­cepts. Maybe we will come up with a design pat­tern library for the study of bib­li­cal and other ancient texts!