Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL)

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Implementing a Social Knowledge Creation Environment
(Scholarly and Research Communication, 2015-10-23) Hiebert, Matthew; Siemens, Raymond; Bowen, William R.; Iter; ETCL Research Group; INKE Research Group
“Social knowledge creation,” an emergent area of research interest for digital humanists, promotes experimental critical interventions into more traditional knowledge production processes. The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria with Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance (University of Toronto Scarborough) have iteratively prototyped a Web-based platform for social knowledge creation called Iter Community. This article discusses the platform’s implementation as a critical intervention in scholarly production and publication, specifically how it provides new opportunities for research and serves as a model to allow for greater involvement of scholars and the public in knowledge creation.
Implementing New Knowledge Environments: Year One Research Foundations
(Scholarly and Research Communication, 2012-03-26) Siemens, Ray; Siemens, Lynne; Cunningham, Richard; Galey, Alan; Ruecker, Stan; Warwick, Claire
In this 2009 article, we present details of the first year work of the INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) research group, a large international, interdisciplinary research team studying reading and texts, both digital and printed. The INKE team is comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefronts of fields relating to textual studies, user experience, interface design, and information management. We aim to contribute to the development of new digital information and knowledge environments that build on past textual practices. We discuss our research questions, methods, aims and research objectives, the rationale behind our work and its expected significance—specifically as it pertains to our first year goals of laying a research foundation for this endeavour.
Understanding the Social Edition Through Iterative Implementation: The Case of the Devonshire MS (BL Add MS 17492)
(Scholarly and Research Communication, 2013-09-03) Crompton, Constance; Arbuckle, Alyssa; Siemens, Raymond
This article reports on the ongoing social edition building process. Using the social edition of the Devonshire Manuscript as a case study, the authors assess the scholarly potential of the process of editing in public, with contributions and feedback from the existing knowledge communities surrounding Wikibooks, Wikipedia, Twitter, and other social media spaces. Working at the intersection of academic and social media culture, they share the feedback of their advisory board, Twitter followers, and Wikipedia editors.
Selected Information Management Resources for Implementing New Knowledge Environments: An Annotated Bibliography
(Scholarly and Research Communication, 2012-03-26) Garnett, Alex; Siemens, Ray; Leitch, Cara; Melone, Julie
This annotated bibliography reviews scholarly work in the area of building and analyzing digital document collections with the aim of establishing a baseline of knowledge for work in the field of digital humanities. The bibliography is organized around three main topics: data stores, text corpora, and analytical facilitators. Each of these is then further divided into sub-topics to provide a broad snapshot of modern information management techniques for building and analyzing digital documents collections.
Electronic Environments for Reading: An Annotated Bibliography of Pertinent Hardware and Software (2011)
(Scholarly and Research Communication, 2013-05-13) Koolen, Corina; Siemens, Ray; Garnett, Alex
In the development of new research environments, hardware has often been neglected. E-readers have (reasonably) successfully been developed for leisurely reading, but reading with the goal of writing demands a different approach. This bibliography has been written to inform the INKE research group on physical aspects of digital scholarly reading. It consists of two parts: a hardware section, including a description of commercial e-readers as well as an overview of academically developed digital reading devices and a software section, also including commercially available packages next to academically developed reading environments which allow for flexible manipulation of text and other modalities; as well as reflections on digital scholarly reading. Combined, the two sections inform an integrated approach in the development of new research environments.
Beyond Remediation: The Role of Textual Studies in Implementing New Knowledge Environments*
(Scholarly and Research Communication, 2012-03-26) Galey, Alan; Cunningham, Richard; Nelson, Brent; Siemens, Ray; Werstine, Paul
This article considers the role of textual studies in a digital world and reviews the work of a particular group of digital textual scholars. Specifically, the article examines the work of the Textual Studies team at the Implementing New Knowledge Environments project (INKE.ca), a group of digital textual scholars working on user experience, interface design, and information management with the goal of better understanding how reading is changing in the context of digital media. INKE’s work rethinks what the book can become and aims to generate prototypes to be shared on an open-source basis with the public.
Social Knowledge Creation: Three Annotated Bibliographies
(Scholarly and Research Communication, 2014-04-17) Arbuckle, Alyssa; Belojevic, Nina; Hiebert, Matthew; Siemens, Ray; Wong, Shaun; Siemens, Derek; Christie, Alex; Saklofske, Jon; Sayers, Jentery; INKE Research Group; ETCL Research Group
In 2012-2013 a team led by Ray Siemens at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL), University of Victoria, in collaboration with Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE), developed three annotated bibliographies under the rubric of social knowledge creation. The items for the bibliographies were gathered and annotated by members of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) to form this tripartite document as a resource for students and researchers involved in the iNKE team and well beyond, including at digital humanities seminars in Bern (June 2013) and Leipzig (July 2013).
Transformation through Integration: The Renaissance Knowledge Network (ReKN) and a Next Wave of Scholarly Publication
(Scholarly and Research Communication, 2015-10-14) Powell, Daniel; Siemens, Raymond G.; Bowen, William R.; Hiebert, Matthew; Seatter, Lindsey
This article reflects on the first six months of funded research by the Renaissance Knowledge Network (ReKN), focusing especially on the possibilities for interoperability and metadata aggregation of diverse digital projects, including but not limited to Early English Books Online—Text Creation Partnership; the Iter Bibliography; the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory; the Advanced Research Consortium network; Editing Modernism in Canada; the INKE working groups; and several other, smaller projects. This article also considers how internetworked resources and a holistic scholarly environment should incorporate and build on existing publication and markup tools. Key to this process of facilitating new forms of scholarly production are including possibilities for middle-state publication; exporting both primary and critical content; and forming new types of technologically facilitated scholarly communities.
The Humanities HyperMedia Centre @ Acadia University: An invitation to think about higher education
(Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2008) Cunningham, Richard; Duke, David; Eustace, John; Galway, Anna; Patterson, Erin
With Humanities Computing and New Media identified as emerging fields of significant strength, it is time for well-funded and fully supported programs in Digital Humanities to be described, developed, and implemented in the university. This article is a description of an attempt to build such a program from the ground up, rather than from the top down. That is, the authors and others created a series of courses, both multi-disciplinary and disciplinary, a database, and a core course designed to make digital humanities a reality, even without having it certified as a program by the governing bodies of their faculty and university. In this article, the database and core course are described in some detail in order to offer what the authors believe to be worthwhile ideas to others who would advance the cause of digital humanities. The article concludes with some concrete suggestions on how to ensure support, to make faculty participation possible, to measure success, and to motivate students.
Published yet never done: The tension between projection and completion in digital humanities research
(Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2009) Brown, Susan; Clements, Patricia; Grundy, Isobel; Ruecker, Stan; Antoniuk, Jeffery; Balazs, Sharon
The case of the Orlando Project offers a useful interrogation of concepts like completion and finality, as they emerge in the arena of electronic publication. The idea of "doneness" circulates discursively within a complex and evolving scholarly ecology where new modes of digital publication are changing our conceptions of textuality, at the same time that models of publication, funding, and archiving are rapidly changing. Within this ecology, it is instrumental and indeed valuable to consider particular tasks and stages done, even as the capacities of digital media push against a sense of finality. However, careful interrogation of aims and ends is required to think through the relation of a digital project to completion, whether modular, provisional, or of the project as a whole.
Designing data mining droplets: New interface objects for the humanities scholar
(Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2009) Ruecker, Stan; Radzikowska, Milena; Sinclair, Stéfan
In this paper, we describe the design of a number of alternative interface "droplets" that are intended for use by humanities scholars interested in applying data mining and information visualization tools to the task of hypothesis formulation. The trained droplets provide several functions. Their primary purpose is to encapsulate the results of the software training phase. They can be saved for future re-use against other collections or combinations of collections. They can be modified by having the user accept or reject features identified by the data mining software. Finally, they can also contain choices for how to display and organize items in the collection. The opportunity to develop a new interface object presents the designer with the challenge of effectively communicating what the tool is good for and how it is used. This paper outlines the design process we followed in creating the visual representations of these interface objects, describes the communicative strengths and weaknesses of a number of alternative designs, and discusses the importance of the study of new interface objects as the means of providing the user with new interface affordances.
"It may change my understanding of the field": Understanding reading tools for scholars and professional readers
(Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2009) Siemens, Ray; Leitch, Cara; Blake, Analisa; Armstrong, Karin; Willinsky, John
As the amount of scholarly material published in digital form increases, there is growing pressure on content producers to identify the needs of expert readers and to create online tools that satisfy their requirements. Based on the results of a study conducted by the Public Knowledge Project and introduced at Digital Humanities 2006 (Siemens, Willinsky and Blake), continued and augmented since, this paper discusses the reactions of Humanities Computing scholars and graduate students to using a set of online reading tools. The results of our study reveal both the potential strengths and perceived weaknesses of online reading environments. Understanding how users read and evaluate research materials, anticipating users’ expectations of the reading tools and resources, and addressing user concerns about the availability of online material will lead to improvements in the design and features of online publishing.
Pertinent discussions toward modeling the social edition: Annotated bibliographies
(Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2012) Siemens, Ray; Timney, Meagan; Leitch, Cara; Koolen, Corina; Garnett, Alex
The two annotated bibliographies present in this publication document and feature pertinent discussions toward the activity of modeling the social edition, first exploring reading devices, tools and social media issues and, second, social networking tools for professional readers in the Humanities. In this work, which is published conjointly with the LLC piece "Toward Modeling the Social Edition: An Approach to Understanding the Electronic Scholarly Edition in the Context of New and Emerging Social Media," we consider a typology of electronic scholarly editions adjacent to activities common to humanities scholars who engage texts as expert readers, noting therein that many methods of engagement both reflect the interrelated nature of long-standing professional reading strategies and are social in nature; extending this framework, the next steps in the scholarly edition’s development in its incorporation of social media functionality reflect the importance of traditional humanistic activities and workflows, and include collaboration, incorporating contributions by its readers and re-visioning the role of the editor away from that of ultimate authority and more toward that of facilitator of reader involvement.
Video-gaming, Paradise Lost and TCP/IP: An oral history conversation between Ray Siemens and Anne Welsh
(Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2012) Siemens, Ray; Welsh, Anne; Nyhan, Julianne; Salmon, Jessica; INKE Research Group
This extended interview with Ray Siemens was carried out on June 21st at Digital Humanities 2011, Stanford University. It explores Siemens' early training and involvement in the field that is now known as digital humanities. He recalls that his first experience with computing was as a video gamer and programmer in high school. He had the opportunity to consolidate this early experience in the mid-1980s, when he attended the University of Waterloo as an undergraduate in the department of English where he undertook, inter alia, formal training in computing. He communicates strongly the vibrancy of the field that was already apparent during his graduate years (up to c. 1991) and identifies some of the people in places such as the University of Alberta, University of Toronto, Oxford, and the University of British Columbia who had a formative influence on him. He gives a clear sense of some of the factors that attracted him to computing, for example, the alternatives to close reading that he was able to bring to bear on his literary research from an early stage. So too he reflects on computing developments whose applications were not immediately foreseeable, for example, when in 1986 he edited IBM's TCP/IP manual he could not have foreseen that by 1989 TCP/IP would be firmly established as the communication protocol of the internet. He closes by reflecting on the prescience of the advice that his father, also an academic, gave him regarding the use of computing in his research and on his early encounters with the conference scene.
Old ways for linking texts in the digital reading environment: The case of the Thompson Chain Reference Bible
(Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2012) Nelson, Brent; Bath, Jon
This paper will briefly survey the historical development of linking systems in the Christian Bible, from their theological foundations to their formation in the architecture of the printed book. It will then examine the apogee of intra-Biblical linking systems in the Thompson Chain Reference Bible, particularly its chain-referencing system for thematic linking between texts. Finally, it will use this mature print technology to consider the state of the hyperlink in current Web-interfaces. It will show that while in many ways modern attempts at a dynamic hyperlink surpass this elaborate linking system in functionality, in a few key functions this old print technology out-performs what is commonly and readily available in current Web-browsers. In pursing this comparative analysis we aim to demonstrate the importance of understanding the organization and navigational structure of the codex in designing digital reading environments that will meet and surpass the affordances of print.
Developing academic capacity in digital humanities: Thoughts from the Canadian community
(Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2013) Siemens, Lynne
Despite DH’s long history, it is still perceived as a relatively emergent academic discipline which has several implications for its ongoing development and acceptance. In order to understand its role in supporting the field’s development and acceptance, SSHRC commissioned a survey of the larger Humanities and Social Science’s community to understand the issues related to DH’s development and acceptance and the types of activities that should be funded. The survey results suggest there is reason for optimism regarding the growing acceptance of digital methods, resources and tools and electronic dissemination as instructors, researchers, and students are using and publishing in digital outlets and creating and employing digital recourses, methods and tools andventuring into new research fields. This trend is likely to continue as students and younger scholars continue to embrace the digital in all aspects of their personal and professional lives. However, this optimism should be tempered to some extent as students and junior faculty are still less likely than associate professors to present and publish their digital-oriented research for a variety of reasons. The field’s more senior faculty can mentor their junior colleagues and students to this end and shape salary, tenure and promotion policies to recognize and reward these efforts. Finally, issues remain around the amount of funding required for the initial development and ongoing sustainability and relevance of digital resources and may become more critical over time. Granting agencies will need to evaluate their funding role in this regard.
Enlisting "vertues noble & excelent": Behavior, credit, and knowledge organization in the social edition
(Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2015) Crompton, Constance; Siemens, Raymond; Arbuckle, Alyssa; Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE)
A part of the special issue of DHQ on feminisms and digital humanities, this paper takes as its starting place Greg Crane’s exhortation that there is a "need to shift from lone editorials and monumental editions to editors ... who coordinate contributions from many sources and oversee living editions." In response to Crane, the exploration of the "living edition" detailed here examines the process of creating a publicly editable edition and considers what that edition, the process by which it was built, and the platform in which it was produced means for editions that support and promote gender equity. Drawing on the scholarship about the culture of the Wikimedia suite of projects, and the gendered trolling experienced by members of our team in the production of the Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript in Wikibooks, and interviews with our advisory group, we argue that while the Wikimedia projects are often openly hostile online spaces, the Wikimedia suite of projects are so important to the contemporary circulation of knowledge, that the key is to encourage gender equity in social behavior, credit sharing, and knowledge organization in Wikimedia, rather than abandon it for a more controlled collaborative environment for edition production and dissemination.
Codex Ultor: Toward a Conceptual and Theoretical Foundation for New Research on Books and Knowledge Environments
(Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, 2009) Siemens, Ray; Warwick, Claire; Cunningham, Richard; Dobson, Teresa; Galey, Alan; Ruecker, Stan; Schreibman, Susan; INKE Research Group
In this paper, we present the conceptual and theoretical foundations for work undertaken by the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) research group, a large international, interdisciplinary research team studying reading and texts, both digital and printed. The INKE team is comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefronts of fields relating to textual studies, user experience, interface design, and information management. We aim to contribute to the development of new digital information and knowledge environments that build on past textual practices. In this piece, we discuss our research questions, methods, aims and research objectives, the rationale behind our work and its expected significance.
dis-Covering the Early Modern Book: An Experiment in Humanities Computing
(Digital Studies/Le champ numérique,, 2009) Cunningham, Richard
“dis-Covering the Early Modern Book” is a description of an experiment conducted during a single day spent in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria. The purpose of the experiment was primarily to find out what kind of digital artefact could be generated from an early modern book. Secondarily, we wanted to contemplate potential use for such an artefact, which subsequently was clearly established to be teaching bibliography, or book or print culture.
Reading Orlando with the Mandala Browser: A Case Study in Algorithmic Criticism via Experimental Visualization
(Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, 2010) Brown, Susan; Ruecker, Stan; Antoniuk, Jeffery; Farnel, Sharon; Gooding, Matt; Sinclair, Stéfan; Patey, Matt; Gabriele, Sandra
This paper describes the preliminary results of combining two complementary technologies: Orlando, a semantically-tagged XML collection of born-digital scholarly resources, and the Mandala Browser, an XML visualization tool. Orlando's current delivery system privileges text as an approach to literary historical scholarship. The Mandala browser represents a radically different way of mediating between the user and the text, translating a text or set of texts into a circular visual form and pushing the user towards a more distant, or at least a more selective, reading of the materials than that associated with conventional print or screen rendering. Through experimental visualizations of Orlando content, we began to address questions concerning the participation of Victorian and Renaissance writers in various genres, the relationship between reproduction and literary production, the connection of censorship to the destruction of literary works, and the relationship between suffrage and liberal or conservative political groups. We argue that, just as a postcolonialist or a new historicist needs to learn about the tenets and processes involved in a postcolonial or new historical critical framework, so too an algorithmic critic should expect to invest some time learning the techniques of a given approach and how to apply them to a particular text or body of texts. These investigations may interest other humanities scholars working with online digital collections, as well as those thinking through the question of how to involve computational processes in complex inquiries using large quantities of texts.

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