"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

Implementing New Knowledge Environments: Year One Research Foundations

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.&nbsp

Selected Information Management Resources for Implementing New Knowledge Environments: An Annotated Bibliography

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

Pragmatic Explorations towards Understanding Wikipedia in an Academic Context

Construit au cours des vingt dernières années et contenant maintenant des millions d’articles divers, Wikipédia est devenu une encyclopédie mondialementreconnue et un puits profond d’informations utilisées quotidiennement par le grand public. Alors que Wikipédia était à l'origine étiqueté par les universitaires comme non digne de confiance, introuvable et tabou, la compréhension actuelle de la plate-forme évolue. Notamment, les chercheurs et chercheuses commencent à saisir le vaste potentiel offert par Wikipédia pour un engagement étendu et légitime avec les créateurs et créatrices de connaissances à la fois au sein et au-delà de l'académie. Cet article traite de quatre initiatives de connaissances ouvertes menées par l’Electronic Textual Cultures Lab à l'Université de Victoria qui explorent l’impact de la participation à Wikipédia.Built over the last twenty years and now containing millions of diverse articles, Wikipedia has become a globally recognized encyclopedia and a deep well of information used daily by the general public. While Wikipedia was originally labelled by academics as untrustworthy, untraceable, and taboo, present understandings of the platform are shifting. Notably, scholars are beginning to grasp the vast potential offered by Wikipedia for extended, legitimate engagement with knowledge builders both within and beyond the academy. This paper discusses four open knowledge initiatives spearheaded by The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria that explore the impact of Wikipedia participation

Beyond Remediation: The Role of Textual Studies in Implementing New Knowledge Environments

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

Gravitational wave bursts from cosmic (super)strings: Quantitative analysis and constraints

We discuss data analysis techniques that can be used in the search for gravitational wave bursts from cosmic strings. When data from multiple interferometers are available, we describe consistency checks that can be used to greatly reduce the false alarm rates. We construct an expression for the rate of bursts for arbitrary cosmic string loop distributions and apply it to simple known solutions. The cosmology is solved exactly and includes the effects of a late-time acceleration. We find substantially lower burst rates than previous estimates suggest and explain the disagreement. Initial LIGO is unlikely to detect field theoretic cosmic strings with the usual loop sizes, though it may detect cosmic superstrings as well as cosmic strings and superstrings with non-standard loop sizes (which may be more realistic). In the absence of a detection, we show how to set upper limits based on the loudest event. Using Initial LIGO sensitivity curves, we show that these upper limits may result in interesting constraints on the parameter space of theories that lead to the production of cosmic strings.Comment: Replaced with version accepted for publication in PR

Preserving Dynamic Collaborative Environments in the Arts and Humanities

In this presentation, we will elaborate on the insights that have gathered from our partnership with Iter Canada towards establishing a robust ecosystem for the long-term preservation of collaborative projects in the arts and humanities. As a work in progress, planning to address the current gap in preservation research affecting a specific academic domain, we will provide the preliminary results from our tests using containers and desktop-sharing systems for the preservation of content in collaborative environments in the digital humanities. In our opinion, the use of these technologies has the advantage of preserving and delivering snapshots of the original user experience in digital humanities projects as they were originally intended by their principal investigators

Social Knowledge Creation: Three Annotated Bibliographies

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, iincluding at digital humanities seminars in Bern (June 2013) and Leipzig (July 2013)

Revolutionary Reading, Evolutionary Toolmaking: (Re)development of Scholarly Reading and Annotation Tools in Response to an Ever Changing Scholarly Climate

As the online scholarly landscape changes, so too must the tools used to traverse it.  The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) Reading Tools provides readers a bridge from online scholarly content to a host of contextual information, to a number of discipline-specific search engines and databases, and to other tools. A lot has changed since it was originally released, such as the rise of Google Scholar as the de facto starting point for many novice (and not-so novice) researchers; the blurring line between desktop and web applications; and the increased professional use of social networking tools and websites. Recently, the University of Victoria's Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL), in cooperation with the PKP, undertook a study to determine the role and value of the existing Reading Tools, particularly in the context of Humanities Computing. The ETCL has also developed a prototype Professional Reading Environment which has been the basis for substantial analysis. Rick Kopak and Chia-Ning Chiang at the University of British Columbia (UBC) have undertaken a broad survey of the online annotation landscape, and have written a proposal for developing an annotation system for PKP software. This paper discusses how, using this research as a base and in cooperation with UBC and the PKP, the ETCL has begun a large-scale redevelopment of the PKP Reading Tools, extending the current toolset to include new social networking and research tools, as well as a robust personal annotation system, making social annotation possible between small groups and the public