This website is an early prototype designed to hint at some of the functionalities to be included in the Serial Experience Project. Below is a brief discussion of how to use this site. We welcome your feedback and are particularly interested in how you see yourself using such a tool in your teaching or research.

The facets along the top allow you to explore related documents according to different categories. For instance, if you click on Charles Dickens under "Authors", you'll see each of the other facets ("Titles", "Periodicals") updated to reflect only that information related to Charles Dickens. The timelines, facsimile and list views also update to show only those novels with Charles Dickens listed as an author. You may select (or de-select) multiple authors using the checkboxes, or you may drill down deeper into one or a few particular novels using the "Titles" and "Periodicals" facets.

You may also use the timeline as a browsing tool. By clicking and dragging the top or bottom of the timeline, you can locate a particular decade or year to see which novels were being published at that time. Each band on the timeline represents the span of a serial run: for instance, the Bleak House band runs from March 1852 to September 1853. Clicking on the band causes a bubble to pop-up with a cover image of the novel (note that not all cover images are correct, since scans are not yet available) and a brief description of the novel pulled from Wikipedia (if available). Eventually students and scholars may be able to tag or edit this description. In the future, clicking on the cover image inside the bubble will bring the student or scholar to a "reading space" where they can browse, search and annotate a scan of the original facsimile. However, because we do not have access to full scans yet, this functionality is not available.

You may zoom in from a decade to a year view using the links just below the facets ("View by Decade", "View by Year"). You may also switch to a simple "List View," or see a collection of cover images using the "Facsimiles" link.

We suggest testing the prototype using the novel Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. Find Bleak House using the facets, the timeline, or both; then click on the cover image to access a full scan of the first serial (the only one available in this prototype).

Finally, although visualizations are not incorporated into the browsing mechanisms yet, we invite you to view a sample of the kinds of visualizations that may be included in the final prototype here.

Please email feedback to hyperstudio [at] mit [dot] edu.