The Value of Plurality in 'The Network with a Thousand Entrances'

This contribution reflects on the value of plurality in the ‘network with a thousand entrances’ suggested by McCarty (http://goo.gl/H3HAfs), and others, in association with approaching time-honoured annotative and commentary practices of much-engaged texts. The question is how this approach aligns with tensions, today, surrounding the multiplicity of endeavour associated with modeling practices of annotation by practitioners of the digital humanities. Our work, hence, surveys annotative practice across its reflection in contemporary praxis, from the MIT annotation studio whitepaper (http://goo.gl/8NBdnf) through the work of the Open Annotation Collaboration (http://www.openannotation.org), and manifest in multiple tools facilitating annotation across the web up to and including widespread application in social knowledge creation suites like Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web annotation

Bringing research and researchers to light: current and emerging challenges for discipline-based knowledge resources

Australian literary studies have, in the past decade, been greatly assisted by AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource (www.austlit.edu.au), a multi-institutional collaboration between researchers, librarians and software designers from ten universities and the National Library of Australia. Under the leadership of The University of Queensland, this collaboration has produced a web-based research environment that supports a wide range of projects and publications across a diverse array of fields in Australian literary and narrative cultures while also becoming a key resource for teaching and general information. AustLit has consistently worked to integrate the research output of associated projects and is currently planning to expand its position in the community with a new open access and open contribution model. A major innovation in data management and maintenance, the AustLit Research Community[1] structure supports the study of Australian literary and story-making cultures by providing a web-based environment where segments of these cultures can be explored and presented as distinct topics within a larger knowledge framework. Scholars are able to build datasets, annotate, analyse and present that data in a range of ways, and publish scholarly interpretations of their findings in the form of peer reviewed articles. The incorporation of these research-rich datasets into AustLit contributes to an overarching goal of building a comprehensive database of information about Australian writers, writing and print culture more broadly. With a recent decision to move from the current access model as a subscription service, available to relatively few users, to an open access and open contributions model incorporating content produced by a network of volunteers, AustLit is now facing a significant new challenge. The Aus-e-Lit Project[2] has delivered innovative tools and services that will enable AustLit users to engage more directly with AustLit data and to contribute to a Research Commons with collaborative annotations and richly described collections of internet resources. This paper will report on the implications that these innovations bring to current and future research practices. It will consider the successes and challenges that AustLit faces with its aim to be the definitive virtual research environment and information resource for Australian literary, print, and narrative culture, not only for scholars in the field but for students of all levels and the general public

Towards a flexible open-source software library for multi-layered scholarly textual studies: An Arabic case study dealing with semi-automatic language processing

This paper presents both the general model and a case study of the Computational and Collaborative Philology Library (CoPhiLib), an ongoing initiative underway at the Institute for Computational Linguistics (ILC) of the National Research Council (CNR), Pisa, Italy. The library, designed and organized as a reusable, abstract and open-source software component, aims at solving the needs of multi-lingual and cross-lingual analysis by exposing common Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The core modules, coded by the Java programming language, constitute the groundwork of a Web platform designed to deal with textual scholarly needs. The Web application, implemented according to the Java Enterprise specifications, focuses on multi-layered analysis for the study of literary documents and related multimedia sources. This ambitious challenge seeks to obtain the management of textual resources, on the one hand by abstracting from current language, on the other hand by decoupling from the specific requirements of single projects. This goal is achieved thanks to methodologies declared by the 'agile process', and by putting into effect suitable use case modeling, design patterns, and component-based architectures. The reusability and flexibility of the system have been tested on an Arabic case study: the system allows users to choose the morphological engine (such as AraMorph or Al-Khalil), along with linguistic granularity (i.e. with or without declension). Finally, the application enables the construction of annotated resources for further statistical engines (training set). © 2014 IEEE

E-Carrel: An Environment for Collaborative Textual Scholarship

The E-Carrel project aims to address the preservation of, access to, and re-uses of humanities electronic text files. It enables dynamic, growing resource projects as repositories for new knowledge. It provides for on-line distributed data and tools that are open to new scholarly enhancement through a user friendly tagging tool, sophisticated use of stand-off markup and annotation (leveraging RDF capabilities), and a browsing system anyone can use. It creates a secure system of text preparation and dissemination that encourages collaboration and participation by anyone interested in the texts. To insure the endurance of authenticated texts, multiple copies are distributed on the Internet. Foundation texts anchor a system for maintaining and growing project usefulness beyond the originators’ interest and the functions they imagined. Increasing access to humanities texts as useful, adaptable, reliable source materials that can be re-purposed will increase interest in continued maintenance, which are critical for long-term preservation and access

Bringing research and researchers to light: current and emerging challenges for a discipline-based knowledge resource

Australian literary studies have, in the past decade, been greatly assisted by AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource (www.austlit.edu.au), a multi-institutional collaboration between researchers, librarians and software designers from ten universities and the National Library of Australia. Under the leadership of The University of Queensland, this collaboration has produced a web-based research environment that supports a wide range of projects and publications across a diverse array of fields in Australian literary and narrative cultures while also becoming a key resource for teaching and general information. AustLit has consistently worked to integrate the research output of associated projects and is currently planning to expand its position in the community with a new open access and open contribution model. A major innovation in data management and maintenance, the AustLit Research Community[1] structure supports the study of Australian literary and story-making cultures by providing a web-based environment where segments of these cultures can be explored and presented as distinct topics within a larger knowledge framework. Scholars are able to build datasets, annotate, analyse and present that data in a range of ways, and publish scholarly interpretations of their findings in the form of peer reviewed articles. The incorporation of these research-rich datasets into AustLit contributes to an overarching goal of building a comprehensive database of information about Australian writers, writing and print culture more broadly. With a recent decision to move from the current access model as a subscription service, available to relatively few users, to an open access and open contributions model incorporating content produced by a network of volunteers, AustLit is now facing a significant new challenge. The Aus-e-Lit Project[2] has delivered innovative tools and services that will enable AustLit users to engage more directly with AustLit data and to contribute to a Research Commons with collaborative annotations and richly described collections of internet resources. This paper will report on the implications that these innovations bring to current and future research practices. It will consider the successes and challenges that AustLit faces with its aim to be the definitive virtual research environment and information resource for Australian literary, print, and narrative culture, not only for scholars in the field but for students of all levels and the general public. [1] See www.austlit.edu.au/ResearchCommunities [2] The Aus-e-Lit project is funded from 2008 - 2011 by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) Platforms for Collaboration, through the National eResearch Architecture Taskforce (NeAT), and by the University of Queensland.PARADISEC (Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures), Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories, Ethnographic E-Research Project and Sydney Object Repositories for Research and Teaching

Annotation Studio: Multimedia Annotation for Students

Annotation Studio is a web-based annotation application that integrates a powerful set of textual interpretation tools behind an interface that makes using those tools intuitive for undergraduates. Building on students’ new media literacies, this Open-source application develops traditional humanistic skills including close reading, textual analysis, persuasive writing, and critical thinking. Initial features of the Annotation Studio prototype, supported by an NEH Start-Up Grant, include aligned multi-media annotation of written texts, user-defined sharing of annotations, and grouping of annotation by self-defined tags to support interpretation and argument development. The fully developed application will support annotation of image, video and audio documents; annotation visualization; export of texts with annotations; and a media repository. We will also identify best practices among faculty using Annotation Studio in a broad range of humanities classes across the country

A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature

The word kaleidoscope comes from a Greek phrase meaning to view a beautiful form, and this report makes the leap of faith that all scholarship is beautiful (Ayers 2005b). This review is divided into three major sections. Part I offers a sampling of the types of digital resources currently available or under development in support of American literature and identifies the prevailing concerns of specialists in the field as expressed during interviews conducted between July 2004 and May 2005. Part two of the report consolidates the results of these interviews with an exploration of resources currently available to illustrate, on the one hand, a kaleidoscope of differing attitudes and assessments, and, on the other, an underlying design that gives shape to the parts. Part three examines six categories of digital work in progress: (1) quality-controlled subject gateways, (2) author studies, (3) public domain e-book collections and alternative publishing models, (4) proprietary reference resources and full-text primary source collections, (5) collections by design, and (6) teaching applications. This survey is informed by a selective review of the recent literature, focusing especially on contributions from scholars that have appeared in discipline-based journals