Bungee View introduces non-technical users
to collection understanding and pattern discovery
while they search and browse.
Bars show the distribution of documents
for each meta-data attribute.
A user searching for American Memory Collection
images of World War II
would click on that bar to add a filter.
When filters are added,
bars highlight correlated features.
Especially tall or short bars represent
large positive or negative correlation values.
Those colored dull green or orange
are statistically significant.
Some of the correlations reflect
obvious relationships about the world,
like the over-representation of
Politics & Government, and of Industry.
Some are more intriguing, like Gliders.
There are only 43 gliders out of 1712 images,
so you might not notice them in a result list.
Since the correlation is very high,
it shows up in the bar chart.
Verifying lack of correlation can be useful,
for instance to check if the selected images
represent a broad range of dates or collections.
These images cover the years 1942-1945 evenly,
and primarily come from four collections.
It is surprising to see that Asia is under-represented
in World War II images.
This must a bias in the holdings
or assignment of Subject terms,
rather than a reflection of the world.
It is also surprising that Men are under-represented,
while Women are over-represented.
Perhaps this is also an artifact of the collection,
or maybe images of women better reflected
the values Americans wanted to believe in,
and the bias is a kind of propaganda.
This is wild speculation,
but a fortuitous green bar
potentially signals a valuable discovery.
