Introduction: Research Foundations for Understanding Books and Reading in the Digital Age: Text and Beyond

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Introduction, Cuba Conference: Research Foundations for Understanding Books and Reading in the Digital Age: E/Merging Reading, Writing, and Research Practices

The fourth of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) “Birds of a Feather” gatherings took place between December 11 and 14, 2012, and included Cuban academic site visits to the National Library and the Casa de las Américas, one of the most preeminent publishers in Latin America. In addition to exploring opportunities for partnership and collaboration in the Americas through unconference discussions, at the conference, the group shared work centred around the digital scholarly edition through the Birds of a Feather structured presentation and discussion

“Introduction: ‘Building Partnerships to Transform Scholarly Publishing'”

On February 5th-6th 2014 researchers, students, and other participants gathered together in Whistler, BC, Canada to discuss issues relating to scholarly publishing in Canada. The day and a half long meeting, “Building Partnerships to Transform Scholarly Publishing,” welcomed participants representing several Canadian libraries and universities, publishers, and scholarly organizations, among others. The event was hosted by Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE; inke.ca) and sponsored by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)

"Enlisting 'Vertues Noble & Excelent': Behavior, Credit, and Knowledge Organization in the Social Edition"

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

"Understanding the Social Edition Through Iterative Implementation: The Case of the Devonshire MS (BL Add MS 17492)"

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 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

Playing Well With Others: The Social Edition and Computational Collaboration

This article draws on the Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript’s RDFa encoding practice as a case study of how to formalize statements about entities on the Web in a way that is machine-parsable. RDFa encoding allows machines to become collaborators with human readers in the discovery of new connections between entities (people, places, and events) even between websites. The edition’s encoding is motivated by the INKE Modelling and Prototyping team’s guiding research question about the implications and impact of real-time applications in relation to traditionally static knowledge objects. The authors argue for the value of bringing texts into communication with other texts, through RDFa, allowing virtual collaboration even when the scholars behind the projects do not know one another

Futures of the Book

The erroneous belief that a new medium will completely replace a previous one is nowhere more evident than in discussions surrounding the emergence of electronic text. Having pre- viously fended off the challenges of the phonograph, motion picture, radio, and television, in the early 1990s the book was seen as finally having met its match in the computer and the internet. In his 1994 book, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, bibliophile Sven Birkerts bemoaned, “The stable hierarchies of the printed page—one of the defining norms of the world—are being superseded by the rush of impulses through freshly minted circuits” (1994: 3). Birkerts was responding to literary theorists such as George Landow (1992) and Jay David Bolter (1990) who saw the networked electronic text, with its relative ease of publishing and modification postpublication, as liberating authors and readers from the shackles of the printed book. They believed printed books would, in the near future, only be read by those “addicted to the look and feel of tree flakes encased in dead cow” (Mitchell 1995: 56). The book could not hope to compete against the computer, and its death was surely at hand. Except, as we now know, it was not

Desire Lines : Making a Network of Relations Visible

"The Desire Lines series began with the proposition that we could see communities formed around print production in Toronto, between 1978 and 1988, by drawing network visualizations from the metadata describing magazine issues. This final panel in the series brings together different perspectives on the ethics of working with collective mapping practices and metadata to make visible relationships in archives and periodicals, which may or may not resonate in human hearts. What are the ethics of working with metadata? Do these algorithmically-derived relationships resonate in human hearts? How do we address the absences in these networks?" -- Publisher's website

Factors associated with an interruption in treatment of people living with HIV in USAID-supported states in Nigeria : a retrospective study from 2000–2020

BACKGROUND : Patient interruption of antiretroviral therapy (ART) continues to limit HIV programs’ progress toward epidemic control. Multiple factors have been associated with client interruption in treatment (IIT)— including age, gender, CD4 count, and education level. In this paper, we explore the factors associated with IIT in people living with HIV (PLHIV) in United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-supported facilities under the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program in Nigeria. METHODS : We conducted cross-sectional analyses on data obtained from Nigeria’s National Data Repository (NDR), representing a summarized record of 573 630 ART clients that received care at 484 PEPFAR/USAID-supported facilities in 16 states from 2000–2020. IIT was defined as no clinical contact for 28 days or more after the last expected clinical contact. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression models were computed to explore the factors associated with IIT. The variables included in the analysis were sex, age group, zone, facility level, regimen line, multi-month dispensing (MMD), and viral load category. RESULTS : Of the 573 630 clients analysed in this study, 32% have been recorded as having interrupted treatment. Of the clients investigated, 66% were female (32% had interrupted treatment), 39% were aged 25–34 at their last ART pick-up date (with 32% of them interrupted treatment), 59% received care at secondary level facilities (37% interrupted treatment) and 38% were last receiving between three- to five-month MMD (with 10% of these interrupted treatment). Those less likely to interrupt ART were males (aOR = 0.91), clients on six-month MMD (aOR = 0.01), adults on 2nd line regimen (aOR = 0.09), and paediatrics on salvage regimen (aOR = 0.02). Clients most likely to interrupt ART were located in the South West Zone (aOR = 1.99), received treatment at a tertiary level (aOR = 12.34) or secondary level facilities (aOR = 4.01), and had no viral load (VL) on record (aOR =10.02). Age group was not significantly associated with IIT. CONCLUSIONS : Sex, zone, facility level, regimen line, MMD, and VL were significantly associated with IIT. MMD of three months and longer (especially six months) had better retention on ART than those on shorter MMD. Not having a VL on record was associated with a considerable risk of IIT.https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.comam2022Human Nutritio

The organic food philosophy. A qualitative exploration of the practices, values, and beliefs of Dutch organic consumers within a cultural-historical frame

Food consumption has been identified as a realm of key importance for progressing the world towards more sustainable consumption overall. Consumers have the option to choose organic food as a visible product of more ecologically integrated farming methods and, in general, more carefully produced food. This study aims to investigate the choice for organic from a cultural-historical perspective and aims to reveal the food philosophy of current organic consumers in The Netherlands. A concise history of the organic food movement is provided going back to the German Lebensreform and the American Natural Foods Movement. We discuss themes such as the wish to return to a more natural lifestyle, distancing from materialistic lifestyles, and reverting to a more meaningful moral life. Based on a number of in-depth interviews, the study illustrates that these themes are still of influence among current organic consumers who additionally raised the importance of connectedness to nature, awareness, and purity. We argue that their values are shared by a much larger part of Dutch society than those currently shopping for organic food. Strengthening these cultural values in the context of more sustainable food choices may help to expand the amount of organic consumers and hereby aid a transition towards more sustainable consumption. © 2012 The Author(s)