User Interface Design for a Mokkan Reading Support System
Yasutaka Tone, Akihito Kitadai, Masato Ishikawa, Masaki Nakagawa, はじめ ばば, Akihiro Watanabe · 2007
This paper describes user interfaces of a system for helping archeologists decode mokkans. A mokkan is a wooden tablet excavated from ruins in Japan. Decoding mokkans is important to study the history, but they are damaged and stained with handwritten characters badly degraded. Therefore, it is very difficult even for expert archeologists. The system for helping them has three components of image processing, character recognition and information retrieval. The image data processing makes mokkan images easy to read. The character recognition presents characters candidates from unclear mokkan images. The information retrieval provides candidates of place names. In this paper, we present two types of User Interfaces for this system. One is a multi-window interface and another is a tiling-window interface. The former has higher flexibility. Archeologists can position and expand windows freely as they like. The latter has less flexibility, i.e., being unable to change windows like the former, but dose not bother archaeologists to operate them. As the result of an evaluation experiment by archeologists, both the interfaces obtained high evaluation, however, the latter was basically preferred in respect of ease of use and ease of understanding with some exceptions. This paper also presents a display method of multiple candidates of decoding.