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Generating Views of Collection Data

Once you have imported your collection data you can create views of the collection to embed and share online. This page describes how to add views and widget, and choose which features to display in your interface.

Building a View


From your data page you can build a view of any collection data set:
  • Click the build button next to a data set to begin building a view.
  • Viewshare allows you to build many kinds of views as represented by the icons below, which appear in the left hand column of the “Add View” dialog box:



List: Objects in collection appear in simple list format.




Map: View plots locations of collections objects on a map.



Pie chart: Pie chart displays round graph.



Bar chart: Bar chart displays horizontal or vertical graph.


Scatter Plot: Scatter plot view plots data points in relation to x and y axes.



Table
: Displays collection data in a table.



Timeline: Shows collection objects chronologically.




Gallery
: Creates a thumbnail image gallery of collections.








By mousing over each view’s icon, you can see a preview of what your view will look like. For instance, here is a preview of the pie chart view sorted by museum:



Click on the icon corresponding to the view you wish to create and then adjust the settings for that view. Each of the views is constructed a little differently but requires you to assign certain properties to the following settings:

 
1. Label is a custom name you will create for this view. The label is the text that will appear on the view tab above your data set.

2. Lens Setting specifies what properties you will see in the pop-up window when you click or mouse over different areas of the view. For the pie chart view above, each time you click on a portion of the pie, a pop-up window appears listing the titles of collection objects with a link to the corresponding images.

3. Display Properties at the bottom of the “Add View” dialog box is where you indicate which properties to display in that view. These properties will be displayed whenever you click on a link for a collection item in the Lens setting. All properties in the left hand column will appear in the view, while those in the right hand column will be hidden. To add or remove a property from a view, just click on its name to move it from one column to another.

Once you have set your properties for the view, click on the Save button in the upper right hand corner of the dialog box or click Cancel to discard the changes. Once the dialog box closes, you should also click on the Save button in the upper right hand corner of the screen to ensure that your data is saved.

Add Widgets to Your Views


In Viewshare, Widgets are features that you can add to your views. Widgets act like “views within a view” and help to highlight important aspects of your collections. In the old version of Viewshare widgets were known as “facets.”

  • To add a widget to your view, first click on the “Build” button in the upper right hand toolbar next to the data set you wish to use.
  • Once in the edit mode for the data set, click on the “Add a widget” blue button at the left/top.
  • The available widgets include:



Search: Adds a search feature to your view.



List
: Creates a list of one selected property in your view.


Tag Cloud
: Creates a graphic composed of words. Items that appear most frequently are rendered in the largest font.



Slider
: Applicable to Timeline views, the slider allows the user to view only those collections before and after a certain date.


Range: This widget allows the user to narrow the number of objects displayed by defined spans of time (such as decades or centuries).



Logo
: This is used to add an institutional logo or graphic to the view.



Text
: Text may be added to the view using this widget.





  • Once you chose a widget you will be prompted to choose a property that you want to display. The interface will show you each of the properties in your collection, the number of distinct values for each property and the number of items that are missing each property.
  • This information is invaluable for deciding which properties to use. For example, the image below is from a collection of images of works of art with 19 items. Since each work in this collection has a different artist, it makes a property like "Artist" a bad candidate for a widget like a tag cloud which displays the relative frequencies of a given value.



In this case, the "Museum" field looks like a good field for a tag cloud, since the works of art belong to only four museums:



Note also that some widgets require that a data field be set to a certain field type in order to work properly. For instance, the Slider widget used to narrow date ranges on a Timeline requires that the Date field be set to “number,” not “date” in order to be able to render the dates in year format (e.g. 1900) on the slider. This is what the Slider looks like if the date field is set to Date/Time:



If you go back and edit the field types, switch the Date or augmented date field upon which you are basing the Slider from “Date/Time” to “Number”:





Save the changes, and view the Slider widget again in the Timeline view. The dates should appear in normal year format:



You can use your cursor to drag and drop widgets to where you want them to appear on the page. To see what the view will look like on the web, click on the Preview button in the upper right hand corner.

Continue to Save and Preview


As you add more views and facets you will want to continue to preview and save your work. Below is an example of what a finished view interface might look like.




In this case, the interface above includes three widgets: a text box, a weighted tag cloud, and a slider. In the center you can see that the displayed map view's pins are colored by the categories. From the links at the top, we can see that this view also includes a list, pie chart, timeline, and gallery.

Once you have created a view you have several options for embedding and sharing that view.

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