Interfacing the Collection

The digital age has led to the advent of electronic collections with millions or even billions of items. This paper examines the types of interfaces that are emerging for large-scale collections, specifically addressing what a large collection looks like online and how it can be managed by users.  In examining these questions, we propose some features that we feel are universally desirable in interfaces to collections.  Overall, there appear to be two sets of features that help users effectively use and sort online content: tools to view, organize and navigate collections; and tools to customize and manage user-created sub-collections

The Face of Interface: Studying Interface to the Scholarly Corpus and Edition

How can we study the interface of scholarly knowledge across print and digital epochs? To ask about interface across epochs is to take a concept that makes sense in the digital world and anachronistically bring it to bear on print in a way that could confuse both. Nonetheless we need to develop ways of thinking about the relationship between design, knowledge and audience across media, and to do that we find ourselves remediating concepts like interface. This paper takes the category of interface and adapts it to studying the design of the corpus and edition

Knowing Ourselves: Building an Interactive Researcher Map at the University of Alberta

Despite claims to interdisciplinarity, universities typically organize knowledge along disciplinary lines in departments and faculties. Institutes like KIAS at the University of Alberta (UofA) have been set up to encourage the development of interdisciplinary research projects, but what do we really know about the research of our colleagues and the connections among them other than their departmental affiliation? How is an institute or interdisciplinary group to know what research directions are pursued by its constituency? Knowledge is vital, and yet Universities struggle to know their own research community This paper describes the development of a research network map of the interests of the humanists, social scientists, and artists at the UofA, which is part of KIAS’ project to understand where there were interdisciplinary strengths at the university and to help connect researchers. In particular, we will describe the challenges around gathering information at an institutional level, and demonstrate the Research Map. The Research Map is a web-based network visualization that shows the connections between faculty members, their research interests, and their departmental affiliation. The outcome is a visualization showing clusters of knowledge and webs of intersectionality, revealing not only the richness of the academic production but also the possibilities of future collaboration between scholars and departments. We are now in the process of adapting the Research Map to be used by others research groups like the Digital Synergies research group. It is a “signature area” for research and creative collaboration focused on digital society, digital methodology, and digital literacies. Adapting the Research Map to be embedded in a website streamlines the process of organizing and visualizing the connections between researchers. We are, in effect, using digital social network analysis methods to help people understand the interdisciplinary network itself

Campus Mysteries: Serious Walking Around

The Campus Mysteries project developed an augmented reality game platform called fAR-Play and a learning game called Campus Mysteries with the platform. This paper reports on the development of the platform, the development of the game, and a assessment of the playability of the game. We conclude that augmented reality games are a viable model for learning and that the process of development is itself the site of learning

The Beginning, The Middle, and The End: New Tools for the Scholarly Edition

This article discusses a set of prototypes currently being designed and created by the Interface Design team of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project. These prototypes attempt to supplement the user experience in reading digital scholarly editions, by supporting a set of tasks that are straightforward in a digital environment but in a print edition would be sufficiently more difficult as to be prohibitive. We therefore offer these experimental prototypes as a collection of new affordances for the scholarly edition, although they may reasonably be extended, with some variation, to other kinds of digital text

The Beginning, The Middle, and The End: New Tools for the Scholarly Edition

This article discusses a set of prototypes currently being designed and created by the Interface Design team of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project. These prototypes attempt to supplement the user experience in reading digital scholarly editions, by supporting a set of tasks that are straightforward in a digital environment but in a print edition would be sufficiently more difficult as to be prohibitive. We therefore offer these experimental prototypes as a collection of new affordances for the scholarly edition, although they may reasonably be extended, with some variation, to other kinds of digital text

CWRC-Writer Design and Survival Strategies: Observations from the Post-Launch Trenches

Abstract of paper 1041 presented at the Digital Humanities Conference 2019 (DH2019), Utrecht , the Netherlands 9-12 July, 2019