Exploding, Centralizing and Reimagining: Critical Scholarship Refracted Through the NewRadial Prototype

This paper discusses the ways that INKE's Modelling and Prototyping team is extending the NewRadial prototype environment to re-present print-based monographs and journals, while enabling new layers and patterning opportunities for those existing forms of scholarship. NewRadial will also be modified to explore, support and encourage digital-born forms of scholarship that retain print-based affordances, but which organize argumentation differently (i.e. linked and layered mind maps, concept maps or flow charts). Through this, we are modelling different types of social aggregation within centralized workspaces to counter the isolation and scattered dialogues that often result from print-based distribution

Fluid Layering: Reimagining digital literary archives through dynamic, user-generated content

This article promotes a theoretical evolution in the conceptualisation and operation of digital literary archives via NewRadial, a prototype archive application that models the following distinction: Whereas a digital edition continues to function as a primary source, the root of a secondary discourse field much like its print-based predecessor, the digital archive should be reconceived as a broader, active, dynamic public record, an information commons that substantiates a foundational collection of primary texts with a continuous aggregation of critical contexts and conversations that grow from that foundation

Beyond Browsing and Reading: The Open Work of Digital Scholarly Editions

INKE’s Modelling and Prototyping group is currently motivated by the following research questions:  How do we model and enable context within the electronic scholarly edition?   And how do we engage knowledge-building communities and capture process, dialogue and connections in and around the electronic scholarly edition?  NewRadial is a prototype scholarly edition environment developed to address such queries.  It argues for the unification of primary texts, secondary scholarship and related knowledge communities, and re-presents the digital scholarly edition as a social edition, an open work and shared space where users collaboratively explore, sort, group, annotate and contribute to secondary scholarship creation

Russian Wolves In Folktales And Literature Of The Plains A Question Of Origins

F or the past several years, my research associate, Robert Buchheit, and I have collected recordings of German dialects spoken by people advanced in years who immigrated to the United States and settled in the Great Plains region decades ago. Our purpose has been to acquire aural records of folk languages, to study the linguistic transformations that have occurred in them, and to preserve permanently languages that will soon disappear. In the course of our research, we have encouraged our informants to speak freely of their personal experiences, family histories, customs, and culture. The numerous recordings that we have made also include many folktales\u27 from Europe. A large proportion of our informants, most of whom reside on farms or in small towns in Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas, are Germans from Russia. The ancestors of these people emigrated originally from Germany to Russia beginning in 1764 during the reign of Catherine the Great, who was herself a princess of German birth. Thousands of Germans were encouraged by the Russian government to form virtually autonomous colonies in the then sparsely populated districts north of the Black Sea and in the region of the Volga River. The migration to Russia continued into the nineteenth century until approximately 1860. Meanwhile the German colonies in Russia grew and prospered until the 1870s, when the government undertook a program of Russianization aimed at breaking down the cultural exclusiveness of the German colonies and integrating the people into Russian society. Objecting strongly to this cultural imperialism, more than one hundred thousand Russian Germans chose to emigrate to the United States, where they settled chiefly in the Great Plains region. RUSSIAN-GERMAN FOLKTALES Among the folktales that these Germans brought ·to the Great Plains are wolf stories, dozens of which Buchheit and I have recorded in recent years. They fall into two distinct groups: folktales with happy, often humorous, endings and those that end tragically as packs of famished wolves ferociously attack and devour human beings. A typical example of the first type is the story of Fritz and the wolf, told to me in German dialect by an informant in Henderson, Nebraska: On the way home Fritz encountered a wolf. What to do? He had been told that wolves do not attack dead people. And so he lay down absolutely still. The wolf stood over him, and its saliva dropped down on his head. He grabbed the wolf\u27s front paws and held them so that the wolf could not bite him, and so he walked home, carrying the wolf on his back. When he came home, he banged the wolf against the door and called out: Father, open up, I\u27ve got a live wolf on my back! Then they turned the wolf and the dogs loose, and they chased the wolf away

Introduction, Feminist War games? Mechanisms of War, Feminist Values, and Interventional Games

Feminist War Games? explores the critical intersections and collisions between feminist values and perceptions of war, by asking whether feminist values can be asserted as interventional approaches to the design, play, and analysis of games that focus on armed conflict and economies of violence. Focusing on the ways that games, both digital and table-top, can function as narratives, arguments, methods, and instruments of research, the volume demonstrates the impact of computing technologies on our perceptions, ideologies, and actions. Exploring the compatibility between feminist values and systems of war through games is a unique way to pose destabilizing questions, solutions, and approaches; to prototype alternative narratives; and to challenge current idealizations and assumptions. Positing that feminist values can be asserted as a critical method of design, as an ideological design influence, and as a lens that determines how designers and players interact with and within arenas of war, the book addresses the persistence and brutality of war and issues surrounding violence in games, whilst also considering the place and purpose of video games in our cultural moment

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)

Social Knowledge Creation: Three Annotated Bibliographies

In 2012–2013, a team led by Ray Siemens at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL), 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 Electric 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). Gathered here, the result of this initiative might best be approached as an expeditious environmental scan, a necessarily partial snapshot of scholarship coalescing around an emerging area of critical interest. The project did not seek to establish a canon, but instead to provide a transient representation of interrelational research areas through a process of collaborative aggregation. The annotated bibliography is purposefully focused on the active, present, and future “social knowledge creation” instead of the passive and past “social construction of knowledge,” in which its roots lie. The difference in emphasis signals a newfound concern with (re)shaping processes that produce knowledge, and doing so in ways that productively reposition sociological and historical approaches. Taken together, the three parts of the bibliography connect contemporary thinking about new knowledge production with a range of Web 2.0 digital tools and game-design models for redesigning knowledge processes to better facilitate collaboration

The Motif of the Collector and History in Ondaatje\u27s Work

Jon Saklofske, in his paper The Motif of the Collector and History in Ondaatje\u27s Work recognizes that Ondaatje rescues Buddy Bolden from historical obscurity by elevating and complicating the musician\u27s largely forgotten history with a self-conscious and largely fictional synthesis of memory and imagination. The liberties Ondaatje takes in Coming Through Slaughter with his subject to achieve this re-presentation and the ownership of the portrait that results exposes this type of authorial activity as a problematic appropriation. Saklofske suggests that to understand the implications of Ondaatje\u27s activity it is useful to compare his efforts with Walter Benjamin\u27s collector figure, who is both a selfish, destructive thief, and a careful preserver. As a collector, Ondaatje becomes the owner and an essential part of this transformed and personalised image of Bolden. Further, Saklofske argues that Ondaatje preserves Bolden\u27s presence, actively confronts historical exclusivity, and interrupts his own authority over his subject. Although his interaction with actual historical figures decreases with successive novels, Ondaatje\u27s personal encounter with the impersonal machine of history continues, asserting itself repeatedly as a successful strategy against destructiveness or authoritative exclusion

brat Rapid Annotation Tool

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Spreadable Jams: Implementing Social Scholarship through Remodeled Game Jam Paradigms

Game design communities often come together during ‘Game Jams,’ open social events in which game makers creatively respond to a design provocation by generating numerous prototypes over a short period of time. Such prototypes are often discussed between participants at the end of the event, then shared with a larger public audience. This fruitful process, which encourages collaborative sharing rather than competition between participants, differs in purpose, structure and outcome from many existing models of academic scholarship and scholarly communication. Inspired by the potential of such events, this paper argues that the game jam paradigm, and more generally, ‘spaces apart,’ can be effectively adopted, adapted, and repurposed to facilitate a broader social generation and dissemination of research creation prototypes, modelling an alternative kind of scholarly making in the humanities that runs parallel to, and is as equally valued and valid as, existing publication models