Jerry Station

Background

Fontes Anglo-Saxonici, a resource for storing relationships between Anglo-Saxon texts and their sources. The electronification of the Fontes database is of great significance in helping scholars quickly identify all written materials in English or Latin texts that have been incorporated, quoted, translated, or adapted anywhere. This project has been a collaborative effort of many people and many institutions for many years.

The Exsiting website has used the modern database and is designed to meet the current design standards of the web page. However, the biggest problem is that it is read-only. Therefore, this iteration mainly needs to solve this problem and make Fontes Database have the function of adding, deleting, changing, and reviewing.

The project goal is to achieve different requirements based on different user roles. The primary goals of the project can be summarised with these three types:

Contributor

1) This role is granted access to a separate administrative background to submit entries.

Editor

1) Editor can edit/delete and save the content submitted by contributors to the database and push it so that the new entry will appear on the website and can be searched by users.

2) This role rights can do CRUD functionality to the existing data.

Add new Target Text

Add new entries

Edit and delete to current entries

User-end

1) Sort the entries by chapter.

2) Add a new tab, “Contribute”, to the page navigation, which introduces the relevant. information to encourage people to help to contribute draft entries.

3) Users can report errors to the website for existing entries.

User Rsearch

The subjects voluntarily participated in the user survey in the form of questionnaires. What they will receive is a prototype compressed file and a link to an online questionnaire. They are asking to give a 5-minute questionnaire after operating the prototype. The whole process was taken around 10 minutes. If the participants have questions about the operation, relevant video clips with a guide are attached.

Participants:

More than 20 subjects took part in the questionnaire. There are three types of subjects.

1) Part of the participants in this user test is the existing users using the Fontes database platform. These users can help the project to obtain the most realistic user needs on the UX interaction and information structure.

2) Software engineers whose daily work is related to software development. They can give reasonable suggestions for website development.

3) UI Designer. A dedicated user interface designer can give good advice on platform framework design and interface design.

Materials:

1) The prototype of Fontes Anglo-Saxonici was made by Sketch, which is exported to an HTML file. The prototype covers the operation interface of the three characters. Each interface operation will have the corresponding guidance clip video, which can help participants understand the operation procedure.

2) the questionnaire was published on Qualtrics, consisting of fifteen questions. Most of the questions are in the form of single choice and multiple choice. The last topic is open-ended type. The topics included basic background questions about the subjects, their use of the platform environment, and some habitual questions. Most importantly, the questions ask the participants about their suggestions and preferences regarding platform interface and operation.

Data & Analysis:

At the latest count, a total of 24 subjects participated in this user test. As illustrated in the below Figure15, a set of charts can show the data collect. According to the survey results, it can be concluded as follows.

1) Most of the participants were scholars.

2) Most of the subjects used the platform to look up the source of a very specific text passage.

3) The most widely used browsers are Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

4) Participants think that the new Fontes Database is easy to operate, and the information framework is relatively easy to understand.

5) Participants were not very fond of pop-ups.

6) Some subjects found it difficult to read because of the color and size of the font.

7) Some of the subjects also offered similar websites they have used, such as old version of Fontes, Persus, DOECorpus, Electronic Sawyer, ELMSS, to name but a few.

Design Part

The above figure shows an overview of the product design. The Fontes backend, which is divided into five modules, Search, My Contributions, Audit, Contributor, and the rest are information pages. Besides, stakeholders hoped that the user interface style of the back-end management development should be kept consistent as the existing website.

A screenshot of project prototype

A screenshot of search page

A screenshot of Adding new TargetText page

A screenshot of entries page

Development&Implementation

The application was developed in NodeJS and Express using the NodeJS core packages and modules and Express middleware. Other third-party middleware was also used to develop a working prototype application. Overall,This project was continued using NodeJS and MongoDB. In general, this iteration is about managing the Fontes database, creating new data, and adding, deleting, and checking existing data. Besides, it also provides people interested in the Anglo-Saxon text to contribute the draft entries in their hands.

Back-end management development-2021

Iterative Development for Anglo-Saxonici