Research Project: Designing a Digital Library
The Digital Library was conceived as a capstone project for my MA in Digital Humanities (Loyola University Chicago, Class of 2021), and is scheduled to become a part of Purple Pencil Project, a platform I built in 2019 to promote Indian Literature across languages.
Project Snapshot
Title: Designing a Multilingual Digital Library
Research Question: How does platform design influence readers of literature? How can it be designed to help readers discover culturally/linguistically diverse and inclusive works of fiction?
Project Team: Prakruti Maniar Project Director, UX Researcher, UX Designer
Methodology Used:
- Project Management: Agile Project Management (+Kanban) across four months, from planning to execution
- User Experience Research: Survey, Interviews, Persona-creation
- User Experience Design: Rapid Prototyping and mid-fidelity Wireframing
Objective
When you search for ‘best-selling books’ or ‘must-read books’ one thing becomes quickly apparent (if you are conscious about it) — that each book in each list is written in English, and belongs almost entirely to the Anglo-American literary canon. The very term ‘literature’ is associated with books written in English.
For anything outside this default, there are signifiers — “African-American”, “Asian”, “Hindi Literature”, “Korean Literature”. This Western-centricism is aparent in both trade and academia, furthered by the algorithms that are built on the foundations of databases built and designed in the West. This makes discovering books unbiased incredibly difficult, proving disadvantageous to regional cultures and publishing industries.
The project started based on this hypothesis.
Work
Phase 1- User Needs Assessment, Database Design, and Prototyping
The project began on January 19th, 2021, and the first phase concluded on April 30th, 2021.
First, a survey was sent out to readers in India and USA (TA in the USA included non-resident Indians, scholars and students of postcolonial literatures, and acquisition staff at libraries).
Data was synthesized from a total of 263 participants on their reading habits, to first establish a causal relationship between database design of existing platforms where books are discovered and the users exposure to the kinds of books, then to use the insights to design a database schema and user-facing interface.
Finally, the project was presented virtually to 19 people (2 of which were the jury), and it was successfully defended.
Survey
The survey, a user-needs assessment to gauge the digital reading experiences of readers and the extent of diversity, was conducted in English using Qualtrics.
The questions are as below, but not in the format or applied skip logic. The main questions are for Indian readers. The alternative questions, indicated with OR, were for non-Indian readers.
- How old are you?
- How often do you read for leisure?
- How many books a month do you read?
- Where do you discover your next read?
- How many (Indian) languages can you read in?
- How often do you read (creative fiction) in an Indian language besides English? OR How often do you read non-American authors and translations?
- When was the last time you read in a non-English language?
- What stops you from reading non-English books more often?
- How many writers from your own State can you identify? OR How many South Asian writers do you know?
- (For those who read in non-English language less than once in three months) Why do you not read more often in non-English languages?
- How would you start to search for stories from different parts of India? OR How would you search for books from India?
- What genre of translated stories would you prefer?
- In what ways do you engage with literature online?
- How much time would you spend to deliberately discover books from a particular author, region, or language? (Options range from under 10 minutes to 30 minutes in one session)
- Do you feel like you need to read more stories from other regions of the country or from other (Indian) languages? OR Do you feel like you need to read more stories from other regions of the world?
- What would encourage you to read stories from other regions?
- Do you think a Digital Library to discover books from different parts of India would interest you?
Interview
The survey was conducted entirely in English, as the scope of the project did not allow to translate it into any other dominant Indian languages.
However, I took interviews with two people: a 60-year old Indian woman residing in Oakbrook, IL, and a 35-year-old Marathi-language reader residing in Mumbai, to understand their reading habits along the lines of the survey. Both interviews were conducted over Zoom. They lasted an hour each, and were unrecorded (upon request).
I also interviewed a Digital Librarian and a Librarian in-charge of Acquisitions at Loyola University Chicago to understand how cataloguing systems classified literature from India, how they acquired diverse books in their collections, the portals they used (or wished existed) to discover such books, the limitations of the time and resources they faced in trying to discover books, and more.
Landscape Scan
I conducted a deep dive into the percentage of non-Anglo-American books in 29 “Best Books of all-time” lists, the percentage of non-English books on Goodreads list of “Indian Literature” or “Indian Books”, an analysis of the results that appear for the terms “Indian Literature” on the Google Search Engine, a language analysis of Wikipedia pages for Indian authors in English and Marathi. This established a biased pattern of representation, proving the hypothesis that literature written in English gets to be called “Indian” while other writers and stories get regionalized, thereby limiting the exposure they get on the global scale.
Personas Created
Based on the survey, the interviews, and my own work in media, publishing, the landscape scan, the following personas were created (written here in brief).
✓An acquistions librarian in the USA from a college with a thriving South Asian Studies department =, who was looking to find books from independent presses in different countries but had no idea where to access them in the USA, and has little time to go through the thousands of publishers in each country outside the US. Of particular problems are countries like India which do not have a well organized database of literature from across the countryes, and they wish that supporting marginalized voices was not so time-consuming.
✓ A professor of post-colonial literature who read an academic article about the overrepresentation of some authors in the postcolonial literature syllabi and wanted to diversify their reading material to encourage more regional Indian voices for the next semester, but there is only two weeks before the syllabus must be finalized
✓ An Indian woman, mother of a four-year-old, 35 years of age, living in Bengaluru, who has just inherited a collection of books from her mother, which remind her of the stories she grew up on, and wishes to reconnect with her cultural and linguistic roots by reading more of contemporary literature. She also wants to introduce her daughter to bilingual reading, but does not know where to start searching
✓ A 42-year old Indian man, living in Mumbai, who recently reads bilingually in English and Gujarati, but finds it hard to keep a track of new releases and discussions on Gujarati books he mostly buys books on ecommerce sites, and cannot discover Gujarati books easily. He has no time to go to the public library which is an hour away, or spend too much time looking for them. He finds that the lack of access is a huge hindrance in his endeavours to continue to read the books of his language.
Database Schema and SQL Dump
Database Collection
The data was collected from JSTOR archives of various journals and papers on Indian Literature, published between 1965 and 1980, and focused on four languages — Hindi, English, Marathi, and Gujarati. Images for books came from various ecommerce sites, blurbs were self-written, and author information pulled from WikiData (manually).
Protoype Built Using AxureRP. Interactive Prototype can be accessed here. It’s a work in progress on it’s way to being a high-fidelity prototype.
Next Steps
- Phase 2 — User Experience Research (Testing, Performance Analysis)(Coming Soon)
