WE use the word collaboration quite freely these days and point to collaborative research as a promising direction for humanities scholars to take. But in a field where lone scholars continue to dominate research output with single-authored articles and monographs, there is understandable resistance to growing institutional pressure to collaborate.
As those of us who work in the academy know all too well, measurement of research output is closely connected to the trajectory of our careers and so points scored are jealously guarded as tokens of value to be collected and redeemed at times of promotion or institutional movement. But as the potential of large-scale collaborative projects become more possible with the development of tools designed to enable contributions from a widely dispersed collection of scholars, this model of reward has become problematic.
The authoring tools being developed by the Aus-e-Lit Project fall right in the middle of this problematic area because of the support they give to multiple contributors from various levels of the academy, the community of independent scholars or, potentially, the general public.
The ANNOTATION TOOL will allow users to enhance AustLit records by adding information about a work or an author that would not normally be indexed by AustLit. For instance, information about the role of a literary agent in the publication of a particular edition could be added, providing a foundation for generating networks of influence in the publishing industry. If we can imagine scores of independent researchers contributing such information, cultural fields could emerge from the contributed data that tell us more about the publishing industry than we currently know.
The COMPOUND OBJECT AUTHORING TOOL allows users to define relationships between AustLit records and the growing number of disparate resources delivered via the internet by local, national and international archives and libraries. Using this tool a researcher could connect all available digital images and transcriptions of a work to their respective AustLit records and generate a digital archive to which the researcher's colleagues can contribute explanatory and textual notes that help to explain the work's textual transmission, its reception at various times, or its possible meanings in literary and cultural terms.
All of this connecting and describing is supported by a format known as RDF (Resource Description Framework) that delivers (currently) the internet resources through a Firefox browser. In this research environment, no images or text are saved, relieving the user of maintaining an archive or worrying about copyright. Ultimately, engagement with digitised archival material through the Aus-e-Lit interface will enrich the archival material by adding enhanced descriptions in stand-off markup that is stored in an Aus-e-Lit repository as RDF. Click on the Video Demo link to see the tools in action.
In the Aus-e-Lit interface all contributions can be identified by author with an associated date and time stamp. Such an environment supports peer-reviewing at a micro-level, allowing a researcher's work to be validated, quantified and assessed. At this early stage of development there is no established reviewing process, but such contributions to knowledge could provide an alternative or a supplement to the conventional article or monograph.
A fertile research environment emerges with tools that support the aggregation of disparate resources and annotations that describe these resources and the relationships between them. Such research environments have already emerged in the sciences, but an application in the data-rich environment already provided by AustLit is obvious. Models such as 'open notebook science' or 'enhanced publications' or 'mesotext' are available for AustLit researchers to consider, all of which favour open-source data with crowdsourcing contributions that make the most of publicly funded data and the publicly funded expertise that can contribute analyses.
Such models show the promise of Aus-e-Lit tools, but this promise pushes the boundaries of academic reward, publishing, copyright and the potential for collaboration in the near future. As we continue to test those boundaries, the annotation and compound-object authoring tools developed by the Aus-e-Lit Project will make a valuable contribution to the practice and theory of humanities research.
Showing posts with label digital humanities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label digital humanities. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Testing LORE with an Eye on ASAL 2010.
Aus-e-Lit development is approaching a very busy time. Members of our testing group are planning small projects that can be supported by annotation and 'compound object' authoring tools (known as LORE: Literature Object Re-Use and Exchange) that our software engineers, Anna Gerber and Andrew Hyland, are busily 'refactoring' and 'debugging'. A new version of the tool is imminent, but video demos of older versions can be seen at the Aus-e-Lit Project page.
Our Aus-e-Lit testing group will propose a panel session to the organisers of ASAL 2010, UNSW, 7-10 July 2010. The projects will include explorations of textual scholarship and scholarly editing, adaptation, literary criticism, film studies and the relationship between poets and artists in the production of limited edition artist's books. Issues such as authorship, textual integrity, aesthetics and reception will be discussed with particular attention paid to the way we might talk about these issues within the emerging field of digital humanities. The major themes and issues will emerge through testing and I will report on them here.
Over the next few weeks I'll contribute posts that look more closely at the way LORE supports individual or collaborative annotation and guide you through the world of compound objects and the potential of the semantic web for those working with Australian writers, artists, publishers and readers. I'll talk more fully about the foundation of this project in the Open Archives Initiative and speculate where a project such as this might lead in the years to come. Discussion might also lead to proposals for new names for the thing that is currently known as a compound object! Your recommendations on this will be enthusiastically received, but 'Fred' will not be accepted.
Our Aus-e-Lit testing group will propose a panel session to the organisers of ASAL 2010, UNSW, 7-10 July 2010. The projects will include explorations of textual scholarship and scholarly editing, adaptation, literary criticism, film studies and the relationship between poets and artists in the production of limited edition artist's books. Issues such as authorship, textual integrity, aesthetics and reception will be discussed with particular attention paid to the way we might talk about these issues within the emerging field of digital humanities. The major themes and issues will emerge through testing and I will report on them here.
Over the next few weeks I'll contribute posts that look more closely at the way LORE supports individual or collaborative annotation and guide you through the world of compound objects and the potential of the semantic web for those working with Australian writers, artists, publishers and readers. I'll talk more fully about the foundation of this project in the Open Archives Initiative and speculate where a project such as this might lead in the years to come. Discussion might also lead to proposals for new names for the thing that is currently known as a compound object! Your recommendations on this will be enthusiastically received, but 'Fred' will not be accepted.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Digital Humanities: Past present and Future
On 2 September the Digital Humanities Symposium was hosted by the University of Western Sydney. A relatively small number attended the event, but the presentations and discussion were interesting and relevant to Aus-e-Lit
Willard McCarty talked about the Dictionary of Words in the Wild http://dictionary.mcmaster.ca/ and Paul Arthur talked about spatial history with particular reference to the Northbridge History Project http://www.northbridgehistory.wa.gov.au/ . Ien Ang talked about using the web-site DiverCities http://acl.arts.usyd.edu.au/threecities/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=25&Itemid=37 to facilitate intercultural dialogue. Andrew Murphie talked about open access and the rise of alternative forms of publication, noting the division between tradition and ‘non-hierarchical forms of authority’ See http://www.andrewmurphie.org/ for more. And Leonie Hellmers talked about her new role at http://www.intersect.org.au/ .
In the spirit of these projects, the Aus-e-Lit project aims to contribute to the development of digital humanities in Australia with its collaborative integration and annotation services. AustLit has already built a strong foundation of collaborative research by supporting more than a dozen Research Communities. The expansion of digital services provided through the Austlit interface will further support collaborative research in these projects and, hopefully, lead to the organisation of new research communities that will benefit from the Aus-e-Lit initiatives. In turn, new collaborations will contribute new ideas, assisting the Aus-e-Lit team to develop a service that will assist researchers in the fields of Australian literature and print culture for many years to come.
In the coming weeks and months, this blog will review many old and new digital projects to discover the depth and quality of digital humanities in Australia and to compile a list of web-sites that might inspire other researchers to embark on their own digital projects. Some of these will focus on literature, but many will cross disciplines, providing a view of the past and present that is relevant to all.
Willard McCarty talked about the Dictionary of Words in the Wild http://dictionary.mcmaster.ca/ and Paul Arthur talked about spatial history with particular reference to the Northbridge History Project http://www.northbridgehistory.wa.gov.au/ . Ien Ang talked about using the web-site DiverCities http://acl.arts.usyd.edu.au/threecities/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=25&Itemid=37 to facilitate intercultural dialogue. Andrew Murphie talked about open access and the rise of alternative forms of publication, noting the division between tradition and ‘non-hierarchical forms of authority’ See http://www.andrewmurphie.org/ for more. And Leonie Hellmers talked about her new role at http://www.intersect.org.au/ .
In the spirit of these projects, the Aus-e-Lit project aims to contribute to the development of digital humanities in Australia with its collaborative integration and annotation services. AustLit has already built a strong foundation of collaborative research by supporting more than a dozen Research Communities. The expansion of digital services provided through the Austlit interface will further support collaborative research in these projects and, hopefully, lead to the organisation of new research communities that will benefit from the Aus-e-Lit initiatives. In turn, new collaborations will contribute new ideas, assisting the Aus-e-Lit team to develop a service that will assist researchers in the fields of Australian literature and print culture for many years to come.
In the coming weeks and months, this blog will review many old and new digital projects to discover the depth and quality of digital humanities in Australia and to compile a list of web-sites that might inspire other researchers to embark on their own digital projects. Some of these will focus on literature, but many will cross disciplines, providing a view of the past and present that is relevant to all.
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