Chantier HN Triangle

h1. Notes prises aux journées _Digital Scholarly Editions as Interfaces_

Sept. 23-24, in the Center for Information Modelling - Austrian Center for DH at the university of Graz; endorsed by the DiXiT network

Sam Saïdi - notes

h2. 9.30 Dot Porter, University of Pennsylvania

What is an Edition anyway? A critical examination of Digital Editions since 2002

If one picture is worth a thousand words, an interface is worth a thousand pictures

She thinks about the user, and wants to come back to this primary question "What is an edition anyway?"

she has looked up the definition "e.di.tion" in google which says : 

    - a particular version of a text

    - a binding of different text

Right, not so interesting she says. As a medievalist she can give more complex definition of the term. She will show us different manifestations of textuality and digital editions :

A first illustration: the The Bankes Papyrus (British Museum Papyrus 114 [2nd c. CE]), columns 1-3. Via the Homer Multitext Project. (P. Lond. Lit. 28). : https://sarahemilybond.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/114_1-1.jpg

A second example: Dante Commedia edited by Prue Shaw : http://www.sd-editions.com/AnaAdditional/CommediaEx/CommediaExhome.html

The main page provides us with a beautiful illustration and the essential informations pointers / the main menu (Image/text - Title Page - Intro - Word Collation - Help - VBase) 

Then if we look at a sample of the image/text visualisation (http://www.sd-editions.com/AnaServer?commedia+0+start.anv+stype=textimage), we have the facsimile on the left, and the transcription on the right .. and as she says a very usefull dropdown menu in the middle (from top) : the "Editorial Material" a sort of index of the content.

Dot Porter cares about the opinion of users when using digital scholarly editions (DSE), especially the attitude of medievalists toward DSE. 

Thanks to her background in anglo-saxon litterature, she knows medieval texts and she has daily opportunities to speak with a lot with medievalists about their approach towards Digital ressources and towards DSE.

Her first 2 surveys that were of great use to her, very helpfull : 

    - First survey : mail to a hundred people

    In the first survey she learned that users were using the DSE only if the print version was not available

    - Second survey : mail to 150, and use of large lists (Early English Text Society : http://users.ox.ac.uk/~eets/ )

    A (third?) new survey concentrated on the question "What is a DE?" and using the Sahle's distinction between a digitized edition and a digital edition (see also E. Pierazzo)

Users Answers "I use More time than I can count" :

    Print editions : 78 %

    Digitzed editions : 77%

    Digital editions : 40%

Questions arise from these results :    

    Are we creating DE that people are using ? 

    Does it matter? 

    If I use it for my research does it matter that other people don't relly use it?

    And, again, still the same question : What is an edition?

On the basic level : flowding text

She shows the exemple of The Schoenberg institute for manuscript studies : https://schoenberginstitute.org/

And a citation by Christopher Flüeler :

    "Can the publication of a digital manuscript on the internet be understood as an edition? 

    Further: could such an edition even be regarded as a critical edition?"

    Digital Manuscript as Critical Edition

    https://schoenberginstitute.org/2015/06/30/digital-manuscripts-as-critical-edition/

Dot Porter speaks about her experience at the Penn University Library, Open Library Upenn / The Online Books Page (2 millions free books on the web!) : http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/

And she reminds us that one of the most asked features for the open library is a PDF version of each text !

Modelising manuscript illustrated VisColl on github : https://github.com/leoba/VisColl

    E-Codices http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/fr

    iiif.io : http://iiif.io/ 

    iiif API to make edition of groups of manuscript from everywhere / System for viewing edition

Then she reveal her Tshirt and a diap with this statement : "Data over Interface" (which will bring a lot of commentaries and debates during the symposium)

This collaboration: the Designer is the one that is often missing, when he's the specialist for the visual communication.

h2. *Session 1: Readability, Reliability, Navigation*

h3. 11.00 Eugene W. Lyman, Independent Scholar

Digital Scholarly Editions and the Affordances of Reliability

Eugene W. Lyman speaks of 2 types of affordances : 

    presentation affordances 

    affordances for expertise

He makes us compare 2 magnifiers on the screen : 

    the magnifier on the left is bad compare to the one on the right

    the one on the right is more accurate 

Indeed, on the left : the schematic round magnifier glass realism works against its use as  you can't see the zone you’re magnifing. The magnifier hides it.

Whereas, the magnifier on the right works very well (winchester project that have that magnifier, you can use it here for instance : http://www.maloryproject.com/image_viewer.php?gallery=Winchester&image_id=11&pos=11 ) : make seeing much easier because we know the zone we’re looking at !

Designing interface that are at once stable and flexible stimulation as well as clear, is one of the 2 most demanding tasks (in both sense of demanding) 

E. W. Lyman started a work on interface 10 years earlier, but there were other pb at that time than concentrating on the Interface : 

Of course the TEI was absolutly necessary, but it did have an impact, like on people like Susan Hockey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Hockey (speach : standing up for TEI, it got pbs but, we need it) 

She sees things as small steps, say that TEI does what you want to do. There are positive sides to this kind of speeches, but no sense of dialog at all.

The MLA committee has a clear view of what a SE (scholarly edition) should do ... and having a sense of what they should do, can be a good idea

Indeed the MLA makes a very genral statament on reliability : "SE should be reliable".

So the SE’s basic task is to present a reliable text. According to the MLA, reliability is established by :  

    certification, 

    adequacy

    appropriateness

    consistency

    explicitness

Accuracy, with repsect to texts, adequacy and appropriaeness with respect to documenting editorial principles and practices, consistency and explicitness with respect to methods 

We provide all the evidences thanks to collation, (may or may not be representative of everything) 

E. W. Lyman says : If DEs (Digital Editions) are not more reliable than PEs (Printed Editions), then don’t use them !

DEs can be made more reliable than PEs: if it is not the case, there is no reason tho use them. 

Steadiness is really important. 

How does or how can DEs be made more reliable?

I was talking earlier of 2 types of affordances : 

    - presentation affordances 

    - affordances for expertise

Here is a citation by http://www.biography.com/people/douglas-c-engelbart-9287574#early-life-and-career :

    "Increasing the effectiveness of the individual’s use of his basic capabilities is a problem

    in redesigning the changeable parts of a system…To redesign a structure, we must

    learn as much as we can of what is known about the basic materials and components

    as they are utilized within the structure; beyond that we must learn how to view, to

    measure, to analyze, and to evaluate in terms of the functional whole and its purpose."

    Douglas C Engelbart (Augmenting Human Intellect 1962)

    http://www.1962paper.org/web.html 

If you think of Editions, programs, handling of the users, we have to pay attention to the he users.

William James The principles of psychology 1890 

https://archive.org/details/theprinciplesofp01jameuoft

If you need to concentrate, you need some help to concentrate in the interface you're using... But too much simplifications in an Interface will also block the user who won't be able to rearange things on the page.

The visual concentraction, is something which is difficult to maintain : you shouldn’t be distracted by the scrolling down and up, and by the panelling effect.

E. W. Lyman gives us a demonstration

A desktop software where he got 97 % of the work he needed done = very good interface, with all the main features needed for comparing facsimile / transcription (line by line, with the highlight functionality), etc.

Questions from public :

If a DE is not more reliable, why do we do it? 

E. W. Lyman:  the power of the huge accessibility, makes reliability somewhat not so important, 

We can archive something more important than doing reliable DSE ?

E. W. Lyman: archiving and give a lot of attention on the Scholarly quality; I thing we have to respond to both concerns.

Is your software is on developpment, or online ? 

E. W. Lyman: I was working on it fulltime during 8 years. An archive distributes it : only works on windows, this is all javascript / html, but I though i had something with promax ( http://promax.com/ ?)

E. W. Lyman: Does somebody knows "electron"? Nobody anwers in the room. It's a open source library to build apps with HTML/CSS/JS : http://electron.atom.io/

h3. 11.30 Christopher M. Ohge, University of California, Berkeley

Navigating Readability and Reliability in Digital Documentary Editions: The Case of Mark Twain’s Notebooks

Mark Twain notebooks

The PE principles are no longer in use in our DE.

Fewer people will be interested - no more concealling in the new edition

In reality, liberty with reliability because it was impossible to be entierly reliable (some unreadable material) 

La fiabilité n'est pas si importante puisque l'accessibilité va permettre de mettre à disposition plus de documents

Mark Twain créer des notices : 

On the next manuscript page : 

No tags: we can see the facsimile from the notice, / a lot of differences with the edited printed version we discovered.

Reliability : I worked a lot on the 8th notebook, the “river notebook,” written by Mark Twain while he trained to be a river pilot in 1857

So many deletion, substitution, etc. 

A really unreadable notebook : we had to sacrifice reliability over readability.

Digital facsimile :

    goal in DE : has the notion of readability changed?

    good interface?

    editing, inteface as editorial theory

Questions for the MT project : 

    1) interesting : readability should not exclude reliability, the choices can be made consistant, If it is the case do we loose reliabliity?

    Christopher M. Ohge: the river notebook is not readable, so no reliability, just make it accesible

    2) Why make something readable if it's not readable on the original?

    Christopher M. Ohge: No facsmilie on line without group checking, carfull re-reading, it's a real edition work

    3) tension btw : reliablity and readability : in what sense this tension would go away, if you would publish it on another website?

    Christopher M. Ohge: We don't have the copyright to do that; We have exclusive copyright for this specific edition. It wouldn't be appropriate for any serious editor to publish it on another website

h2. Session 2: Visualisation, Typography and Design I

h3. 14.00 Elli Bleeker and Aodhán Kelly, University of Antwerp

Interfacing literary genesis: a digital museum exhibition of Raymond Brulez’ Sheherazade

Current work : investigationg 

Interfacing literary genesis 

Aodhán Kelly (Dixit fellow): http://dixit.uni-koeln.de/fellowships/early-stage-researchers/#esr11

Elli Bleeker (Dixit fellow): http://dixit.uni-koeln.de/fellowships/early-stage-researchers/#esr3

We, as editor of interface designers. Elli Bleeker shows a nice demo video (no link for video), with Rimski Korsakov's Sheherazade playing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17lEx0ytE_0 ) :  in the video we see pieces of paper moving around, a hand writing, deleting, adding text, etc. 

    Elli Bleeker: their goal with this type of exhibit project is not to do the edition, but to provide the user with an idea of the author writing process and make him/her want to see the Genetic critical edition that will they are working on with Brulez texts.

Inspiration : The touch press-edition of TS Eliot's of Ireland

Brulez's poems, it's a much more confidential corpus : but they want to show the digital exhibit : 3 different parties in colaboration :

        - user studies - continue to built on digital principles - we also want to collaborate

Genetic criticism : 

    analyse the process of the writer - genetic editing them very differnt - could lead to a digital edition but not alsways so - provide an instrument to explore - 

    DE : to do more critical research - we wanted to show our result, we want to invite the readers to discover the texts : 

User Study :

+ tablets for outreach publication

+ 74% respondants used tablets for learning

+ Responsive interface

The interface : very difficult to find a definition. Ours is general :

    "The Interface is a point of contact between the user and a set of embodied info" 

    (Nowviskie http://nowviskie.org/ )

As users, we had Museum visitors and website visitors. Where is the treshold of age, education level for a user?

In the project, 3 main actors :

    The center of Manuscript Genetics of the University of Antwerp (https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/rg/centre-for-manuscript-genetics/ )

    A local web design company (http://www.prophets.be )

    The Letterhuis Museum and Archive (http://www.letterenhuis.be/mdn.net ) 

We wanted an esthetic design which really promotes the perceived usability. 

RFP : we did auditions with serveal design companies // and introduce them to genetic criticism. First they asked 80.000 but went down to 20.000.

Balance btwn the full research project and a way to make it interesting for the audience : necessity to explain to the web designer compagnies what we were doing with the Brulez's Texts, and our scientific goals... And make this presentation as clear as possible.

Obviously, we had to prioritize our objectives for clarity and financial reasons.

They had a grant but they want to share the code for the webinterface on GitHub, for future inhouse possible developments. It will be possible to reuse the design. giving back to the community.

Not only we had to find aspects that can be intersting for the readers, but we learn to explain better our project.

Next steps : 

    did it work?

    user testing

    refinment / maketing of the exhibition

    on twitter : @oadhankelly and @ellibleeker

    transcription phase !

Questions : 

    1) How did designers understood your work on critical genetics?

    Elli Bleeker: very well, very fast actually

    2) To what extent public learn about critical editing? Is it on of your goal?

    Elli Bleeker: Not to teach that, but to show , illustrate the process of writting, see how it's fascinating.

    3) Who should really do this work? The museum? the archive? or the researchers?

    Elli Bleeker: Either !

h3. 14.30 Hans Walter Gabler, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and Joshua Schäuble, University of Passau

Visualising processes of text composition and revision across document borders

I will present a Satelite project on Virginia Woolf's journals draft manuscripts.

Digital collation of editorial control + academic control of Virginia Woolf's journals draft manuscripts

Underlying datastructure depends on DE / Data Processing operation (collate / markup)

Transcribe > markup > preocess analysis

 Apparatus different from metadata | Visualisation / collation/analysis

 => textual development tranformation from writting to typing

 Diachronic slider : 

     you can select a zone in one of the witnesses, and it appears in a separated box , with a browsing possibility btw witnesses (MS1 - MS2 - MS3, etc.)

        questions : 

            1) Could we have a look at your markup? Very document oriented 

        Answer: They use the Guideline // leave the data markup

            2) Several people say they love the fact that you can selection a part of the text and see all the variants of this selection

        question I asked during the break: are your using exist DB? Answer: Yes

h2. Session 3: Visualisation, Typography and Design II

h3. 17.00 Piotr Michura, Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow

Typography as interface – typographic design of text visualization for Digital Scholarly Editions

A very clear and interesting presentation by Piotr Michura. His presentation gave his insight and many references on reading, digital reading, hyper reading, radial reading, distant reading, close reading, learning assistance, emotional responses, engagement tools, etc. I really loved it. It is on of the presentation I will really go back to and actually use for the projects I'm working on. Here are the content of Piotr Michura presentation :

    His page for the event : http://www.shanemcgarry.com/bridging-gap-presentation-graz/

    His slides : https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12555ma-v658HBNjDQNzRlOr6HhjNYv9QgvMLq5oZvh8/edit#slide=id.g35f391192_00

    His Talk : https://www.academia.edu/28681735/Bridging_the_Gap_Exploring_Interaction_Metaphors_That_Facilitate_Alternative_Reading_Modalities_in_Digital_Scholarly_Editions

h2. Keynote

h3. 18.00 Stan Ruecker, IIT Institute of Design

Task-Based Design for Digital Scholarly Editions

Bridging the gap, Stan Ruecker wants to exploring interaction metaphors that facilitate alternative residing modalities of provided SE.

What are the tasks for designing DSE. We do researching design

Stan Ruecker is part of a group implementing new knowledge environments : see INKE http://inke.ca/projects/chicago-conference-2014/

https://www.id.iit.edu/people/stan-ruecker/

Our goals : 

- review digital scholarly editing insights

- consider experience of Readers

Are we always talking about page design? 

What is Reading? 

Stan Ruecker shows us different projects/publication/communication from INKE members :

    Susan Brown - Remediating the editor (2015) 

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1179/0308018814Z.000000000106

    Luciano Frizzera et al. Designing for MultiTouch Surfaces as Social Reading Environments (2013) 

    http://inke.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/INKE-Abstract-for-DH2013.pdf

    See also Luciano Frizzera on this Multitouch Variorum video : https://vimeo.com/91530996

    annotate, comment, display comment, etc. 

    transparent sheets, etc.

    Mihale Ilovan et al (2011). CiteLens (Master design project) See on Vimeo  

    https://vimeo.com/91534798

    Dynamic table of contexts – Stan Ruecker et al. 2014 : 

    https://www.id.iit.edu/artifacts/the-dynamic-table-of-contexts-user-experience-and-future-directions/

List of advices :

- visualisation as experience

- perceptibility

- pre-knowledge

- comprehension

- utility

- interpretation

- engagement

- outcome

- purpose

Stan Ruecker shows us another project by Tomoko Ichikawa (2015) 

https://www.id.iit.edu/people/tomoko-ichikawa/

In a timeline : Entice = enter, engage, exit, extend 

====> ====> ===> ===> ===> ===>

He then moves on to another project where they work their design with wood hexagons. He explains that time doesn’t really exist without event: if there is no event, there is no time to remember.

The hexagons wood pieces are events, and we can assemble them like tools representing time. Some events are really important (big pieces) to the person who is remembering the events, some a bit less (small pieces).

It’s the same thing with critical genetic editions: we have a combination of events.

The materiality of the wood pieces reminds us of the dependencies between events: a piece cannot stand above, if there is no pieces (events) bellow.

He presents another project: a theatre show represented in a 3D set by Jennifer Roberts-Smith et al. (2015). We can see schematic persons, direction (nose, arrows), move them around according to the stage informations.

Another project: Sue LePage design for Judith Thompson White biting dog (2011)

Too skeuomorphic? maybe not

            --

Samedi 

h2. Session 4 How to program the Interface

Chair woman : Martina Bürgermeister, Univ Graz

Welcome - topic : how to programm interface , we will hear about technical stuff, technical point view on interface 

h3. 9.00 Hugh Cayless, Duke University Libraries

Critical Editions and the Data Model as Interface

Welcome to the nerdsession here are my slides, my talk, and my DSE :

    Slides : https://goo.gl/q7kbY0

    Text: https://goo.gl/te3HwK

    DSE : https://goo.gl/iBYXFt

h3. 9.30 Chiara Di Pietro, University of Pisa, and Roberto Rosselli Del Turco, University of Turin

Between innovation and conservation: the narrow path of UI design for the Digital Scholarly Edition

Assistant professor , assistant prof of DH in Pisa lead developper EVT 

Chiara Di Pietro - This the main developper of EVT and Software developper in a cie - DH master degree at the university of Pisa

Here are the slides of the presentation : https://sourceforge.net/projects/evt-project/files/slidesGraz2016.pdf/download

UI issues - 

EVT publication tool for XML TEI 

Specific project : they work on the Vercelli project)

After EVT 1, all written in XSLT, we wanted to add new feature requested form other projects. And it was a natural evolution path to add support for critical editions.

2 problems:

- pb n° 1 : underlying framework less expandable and flexible that we thought

- pb n°2 : the UI had to be re designed 

But before doing the UI redesign we did a thorough state of the art survey

Preparation phase: with the 1rst generation softwares you recognize immediately the layout, because there is a certain conservatism in first DSEs. 

We had to experiment new UI paradigms because innovation and experimentation are positive and necessary, but also to entail problems we have with current DSE's

Was the initial conservatism completely negative?

See diaps for details on the UI choices : https://sourceforge.net/projects/evt-project/files/slidesGraz2016.pdf/download

Another intersting new feature, the Direct bookmark: 

The user can share a particular view of a element in the edition and make a direct url reference to this element aligned in all the selected variants. 

For instance : http://evt.labcd.unipi.it/test/evt-2-alpha/#/collation?d=doc_1&p=A-1r&e=critical&ws=A@2r,B@3r&app=text-body-div-div-p-app7

They reach a reasonable compromise: sometimes intuitive really means familiar

Here are the future developments for EVT2, they’re thinking about:

- traditional critical apparatus layout as an option 

- porting of EVT 1 features into EVT2

- connecting all variant readings to the corresponding images : reliability as you can see for yourself

Questions from the public:

1) Why AngularJS?

Chiara di Pietro and Roberto Rosselli del Turco: to separate the content from visualization

2) Are the 2 softwares all open source softwares?

Chiara di Pietro and Roberto Rosselli del Turco: Yes, EVT1 and the ready version of EVT2 on sourceforge… And the dev version of EVT2 on Github.

3) Question on the javascript transformation from the TEI XML: 

Chiara di Pietro and Roberto Rosselli del Turco: the javascript parsing takes all the data and reorganize them in a Jason format. The parsing allows to retrieve the data, the collation, etc. The parsing is done not only once because not everything is parsed at the same time. Mainly we parse the elements we need for our project, but if you can start adapting it to your own project. First by modifying the CSS, then by modifying the elements parsing.

10.00 Jeffrey C. Witt, Loyola University Maryland

Digital Scholarly Editions as API Consuming Applications

His slides : http://lombardpress.org/slides/2016-09-24-graz-dixit-conference/#/

    Data Display (Interface) Redundancy (use down arrows to display diaps on this) : http://lombardpress.org/slides/2016-09-24-graz-dixit-conference/#/2

    Our Data (use down arrows): http://lombardpress.org/slides/2016-09-24-graz-dixit-conference/#/3

    Our Data Model and API: http://lombardpress.org/slides/2016-09-24-graz-dixit-conference/#/4

    Critical Corpus Database Visualization: http://lombardpress.org/slides/2016-09-24-graz-dixit-conference/#/5

    Building common libraries for common tasks: http://lombardpress.org/slides/2016-09-24-graz-dixit-conference/#/6

    LombardPress Interface Display: http://lombardpress.org/slides/2016-09-24-graz-dixit-conference/#/7

    Mirador IIIF Image Interface: http://lombardpress.org/slides/2016-09-24-graz-dixit-conference/#/8

    Lbp Print Interface: http://lombardpress.org/slides/2016-09-24-graz-dixit-conference/#/9

    Readings: http://lombardpress.org/slides/2016-09-24-graz-dixit-conference/#/10

h2. Session 5: Theoretical implications

h3. 11.30 Peter Robinson, University of Saskatchewan

Why Interfaces Do Not and Should Not Matter for Scholarly Digital Editions

http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/content/digitalsh/early/2016/09/16/llc.fqw020.full.pdf?ijkey=Ug9lRjHglhPGzVG&keytype=ref

Somthing to read

Twitter #DSEasInterface feed his presentation

If everyone believe in something, it should be wrong : 

    DSE as Interface : they may be many things, but you cannot mix the DSE and the Interface

The Bayeux ...

Commedia

The order of bad choices : 

    Get the grant 

    Get the application right

    Reach the widest possible audience

    Have the best possible interface

    Make the data available to others

    Get the data right

A SE : is one where shcolarly attention has been paid to every word (approved by an editor): It's the DATA 

Data over Interface, was a very courageous statement to make here in front of this audience by Dot Porter. But it has too often be Interface OVER data. Here are 2 examples : 

Example 1 : The Guidelines for Editors of SE (MLA): 

        Before 2011 in their statement the first point was Accuracy  

        Today : minimal conditions that must be satisfied, the methods, reuses, technologies, but nothing anymore on ACCURACY !

Example 2 : The Shakespeare Quatuors (he made a lfull account of what is wrong in this edition : thousand of errors. Peter Robinson says it's probably because of subcontract transcriptions made in the Philipines.

We put an excessive concentration on the interface:

    to please grant funders

    for the fetishization of the document 

Manuscripts, books, are fetishized but not the object of SE anymore. It is not right to edit a photographical reproduction of a manuscript facsimile, with the adds exactly in the same place on the page (above, top, etc.)... We are not doign artistic edition. We are giving information.

ex: Che throno \ introno / etc.

The TEI below will enable us to make interesting traitements: result of doing collations (rdg) - mart-orig=aldus 1515 / etc

What is the most important about the SE: the information / knowledge it gives you about a text.

    <app>

        <rdg>ntrono

    <rdg> trono

    <rdg> ntrono

    </app>

My interface is your enemy

What should be important : 

    Get the data right

    Make the data available to others

    Have the best possible interface / don't make it yourself, let the other do it or make money with it (publishers)

    Get the grant application right

    Reach the widest possible audience

Clay Shirkey : "Design for Generosity"

    Images, transcripts, collation made avalable free to all without restriction

    A valid model of texts, documents and works

    Free to all means Free to all

Jerome McGann: In the next 50 years we will have to re-edit everything : 

Question : n° 2 shouldn't it be number 1 ("Data should be made Available to all") before starting to work on it (and "make the data right")

Question Joshua : get the data right // very lake

Different interface for different data : TEI : to make it right

the interface for publishing / visualisation

can be an attempt to research (tree, etc.) : research tools // My reaction about interface is when it just display without teaching the researcher anythng.

h3. 12.00 Tara Andrews, University of Vienna, and Joris van Zundert, Huygens Institute for the History of The Netherlands

What Are You Trying to Say? The Interface as an Integral Element of Argument

    The prezi presentation : https://prezi.com/ig9hh35z2ocl/what-are-you-trying-to-say/

    The text of the presentation : see second diap of the prezi presentation : https://prezi.com/ig9hh35z2ocl/what-are-you-trying-to-say/

Federicao Caria (La Sapienza) & Brigitte Mathiak (Cologne University)

Evaluating digital scholarly editions : a focus group

Brigitte M. : specialized in text mining

Frederico C. : design - classics, museum http://dixit.uni-koeln.de/fellowships/early-stage-researchers/#esr12

http://digilab.uniroma1.it/

An hybrid focus for the evaluatinon of DSE on the User: Nobody said who it was... And what the user actually want to see ? 

In Dixit, our study is ready to be published, about people, testimony, etc. 

If people use the DSE, who are they?

Focus group elements: actually it's really cheap to make people test your Interfaces. It cost us only coffee pots.

And then you need to study the user reaction in front of the screen:

    behavioural eyetracking

    clickstream analyseis

    A/B testing

    usability benchmarking

    moderated remote usability strudies

    usabilities

    etc.

--- Extended usability quality of use : 

    task goals 

    User < intercation / task >  interface

    Task > effectivement > satistafaction > efficiency

We used 3 competitor DSE for our analysis : 

    Patrick's Confessio: http://www.confessio.ie/#

    Walden. Fluid text Edition: http://digitalthoreau.org/fluid-text-toc/

    E. Dickinson Archive: http://www.edickinson.org/

You should find the five scholarly activities and their primitives for your DSE... See indicative list:

    direct searching

    note taking

    writing

    scanning

    comparing

    assembling

    collaborating

    disseminating

    assessing

    organizing

    browsing

    data practices

    coordinating

    collecting

    acessing

    consulting

    monitoring

    searching

    reading

    tranlating

    ...

We distributed a satisfaction questionnaire to compare the 3 DSE:

    Walden. Fluid text Edition: http://digitalthoreau.org/fluid-text-toc/ gained the higher score.

With the Walden DSE, at least they could browse through an table of chapters, and then compare variants of each chapter. While you're comparing 2 variants, you always know were you are thanks to the left information panel. It was considered more effectiveness, more comprehensive... Note that it was the only one without facimile - but it was found more usefull than the 2 others by the users... who could actually do something with it.

    With the other 2 DSE, they got lost, were frustrated, couldn't do anything with them... and found them useless

Video Demo of a user of the Patrick's Confessio: he has a list of task to accomplish on the DSE (open this, find that), ... but is completly lost on the page (we see the arrow turning around, searching everywhere...

 Charles Harpur Critical Archive

 http://charles-harpur.org

 Session 6: User oriented approaches I

h3. 14.30 Ginestra Ferraro, King's College London, and Anna Maria Sichani, Huygens ING

Design as part of the plan: sustainability in digital editing projects

Ginestra Ferraro (UI/UX Developer at King's College): http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/digitallab/Team/ferraro/index.aspx

Anna-Maria Sichani (Dixit fellow): http://dixit.uni-koeln.de/fellowships/early-stage-researchers/#esr10

@ginez_17

@kingsdigitallab

The science had to catch up with the web as technology and design evolve very fast... And frankly, the DSE's I usually see look really updated.

We are stuffing content in a box that doesn't fit. Maybe we should build a new wrapper around the content and this time, it has to last longer. It needs to be flexible and thus vailable.

A diagramm on Time vs features vs quality vs cost

They use an AGILE methodoly for their development.

Suggest to a real life project : try to built a framework with more flexibility 

We are not negociating the quality, it's the center of both models.

AGILE : 

    An iterative methodology that supports a flexible approch to dev

    Assigning different proiorities to tasks

    Faults are discovered and fixed in the pocess

    The final product is functional because

Agile in a nutshell

    iterative / incremental design

    willingness to texplore and adapt

    responding to change

    face 2 face collaboration 

    valuable product

    Moscow approach

    Must 

    Shoul

    Couls

    Won't do this time

How does it look in an actual project?

=> Labels : on category of tasks (tello : https://trello.com/ for project management

What does it have to do with DSE project?

    the main thing : an iterative workflow - flexible process

    prioritise the task (instead of TODO)

    a dynamic 

    and KEEP DOCUMENTING

    KDL's workflow

    also applicable to DSE projects

PRE-PROJECT

    Content design / Information architecture

    content is king, so let's build around it

    how a database struture looks like

    not particularly friendly

    move towards Human friendly 

    get the conversation started qickly

    don't design, sketch

    get feedbak

    move on to the next step

    what does design do for you?

    get you content accross

    TEXT vs Visual

    there is nothing wrong with both of them

    choose what delivers to your audience etc.

Search a body of work : before/and new version of OCVE online chopin variorum edition

http://www.chopinonline.ac.uk/ocve/

The challenges for us were:

    find a commom language

    embrace the agile philosophy from the start

    keep the communiation channel open all the time

    include design early in the process

Questions from the audience: 

    1) Amasing how the scholars adapt to your way of managing the project

    We started only one year ago, we learn as we went (part of the iteration process) - Convincing other scholars in the project was difficult at the beginning, but when they saw we were making things better, they started to collaborate.

    2) The editor can be the designer, or should there be a designer in the lab?

h3. 15.10 Jan Erik Stange, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam

How close can we get to the reader? Co-creation as a valid approach to developing interfaces for scholarly editions?

Jan Erik Stange : https://uclab.fh-potsdam.de/people/jan-erik-stange/

I should be one of the 2 designers here in the symposium ;)

Co-creation : is an approach to design that's why we work mainly with workshops, which is a way of getting close to the reader and to other people in the project

A few words about Digital Humanities in general, and then I will talk about co-creation.

Digital Humanities : 

    - usually DH projects were based on a collabotation between humanities shcolars and computer scientists

    - real interdisciplinary cooperation is rarely working

    - the designer can be an interface between the 2

I usually work around a user-center design, with an iterative design process 

 shortcomings of UCD

 new Digital methods might help ansewring entirely new research questions - how do we identifiy research questions that are truly valuable to the user?

 it is not alwways clear, what might be potentieal user groups for a paricular editon or collection 

 Cp-creation 

 design process that has been applieyed in the buisness contaxt

 active involvment of all stakholders in the design nand develoment process of a project

 stakeholders are seen as experts of their own experience

 collaborative creation of concepts with a multitude

 Common structure 

 inspirational input related work

 ideation session ans clustering

 one or several creative tacks based on generated ideas ans own experience of partipants

 Wrap-up and discussion

 Workshop 1 : lekturen, letures, readings

 objectives workshlp for a reserach proposal in collaboration with leterary scholars of the humbold Univ berlin that had the goal to create new digital interfaces to the recenly ...

 Qualitative data questions, quantitative data questions, etc.

 result : we identified reading visualisation and text as a promissing topic for our research in design 

 2nd workshop : VIKUS PAST VISIONS

 Cultural sensitivity important in this workshop design

 Other project (nothing to do with DSE) we looked at DDB that had founding programm and we interviewed users of this DDB :  question about wokflows 

 in the next face, the scenarii were given to different group, who developped diferent scenario / interfaces !

 Important : 

     4 intrface ideas were produced in the workshop that helped us to identifiy impottant requirements for the design process

     Summerize : 

    take away inhibition of participants

    define a precise questoin to be answered by the workshop

    be ready to improvise, if you realize the workshop concept doesn't work

    workshop is only one part of the whole process

    provide inspirational input at the bebining of the workshopUse 

 Q° 1 : what is an inspirational input (distant, or close to the task ?) 

 most of our material are DSE ?

 Q° 2 : the designers as an interface btwn humanist and digital

 some Digital humanist see themselves that way . 

 are Digital humanist are designer? they sometimes don't get as close to they goal they should do !

 Q° 2 : 2 line of mediation : 

     1rst mediation : DHumanist : data models

     2nd mediation : DHumanist can communicated with the designer 

Christina M. Steiner, Alexander Nussbaumer, Eva-C. Hillemann and Dietrich Albert, Graz University of Technology

User Interface Design and Evaluation in the Context of Digital Humanities and Decision Support Systems 

 Overview collections the collections 

 1641 Depositions historical background 

 fight against english settelements

 TCD library : depositions

 IPSA collection 

 Cultura Project 

 Linguistic pipeline 

 evaluation phases  

 requirements analysis : supporting desing

 formative evaluation : detecting pb

 Evluation process : 

     planning

     carrying out

     working with results

be consistent on the visual language for info visualisation

be clear sabout focal points

be clear on the ???

 Use different visualisation techniques

 use multiple views

 ise differnt levels of details

 provide info on unvertainty

 FAVVES

h2. Session 7: User oriented approaches II

h3. 16.30 Stefan Dumont, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften

“Correspondances” – Digital Scholarly Editions of Letters as Interfaces

Consequence for SE of Letters

scholar often read editions of letters very selective

Graphical interface : 

    Access PArt 

    the Faceted PArt

    indexes of ersonn

    comeback of topics as a starting point and indexes

Darwin correspondance porject

Alfred edcer project

Access : within 

Carl MAria vn Weber an caroline brnadt in prag

Materiality providing facsimiles to explore aspects of a letter

Vincent Van gogh

varied scholarly edition 

one part of the correspondence is already edited in printed form, but not the other par : What to do??

No new transcription of letters - schlefel

Commentary : 

    index entries serve as commentary

    as you can see in the 

BEACON

CMIF

TEI-XML

RDF

http://www.weber-gesamtausgabe.de/A041461

Shift from the reader to the user

Frederike question : 2 observations Digital edition of letters 

    materiality receive more attention than in print editions : margins, and so on, and I'm wondering if it is really necessary: For those letters, the paper was expensive : the line breaks are here because of economic reasons = it has no sense to reproduce it in TEI. The aspect of material are not given as much attention : spots on the page? drop of ink : should those aspect be descibed ? The materiality : is also in last 15 years of printed edition and exhibits

=> the most of the q° :  facsimle : you can code some features, but not always usefull, it cannont reconstruct the page. 

    Other observation : index as commentary of the edition (usefulness for the user). Sometimes is not really helpfull for the user : like to tell "who is someone" is not so relevant. Give a biography is not so relevant... For me what is really interesting should be the relationship between the 2 persons who are writing to each other

Q° : ok for the relationship : one of the reason that it is not done is the data model : that is what is done by other project (link, rdf)

System of exchange : simuation of post-mail

Somedy from the audience answer to Frederike : "Do not mistake the purpose of the authority file that are for machines, not humans ! "

h3. 17.00 James R. Griffin III, Lafayette College

Encoding and Designing for the Swift Poems Project

James R. Griffin the 3rd

Primary designer of the ... Jonathan Swifth Poems Project

how they integrated the project

Envlove in the project : an

importance of the UI 

2 researchers : 

    James Woolley

    Stephen 

Woolley and Karian seel to archive poems attributed to J. Sw.

beginning in 1987 : this has involved 

identifiying and cataloging Primary Sources

Transcription

The libraries at Lafayette : 

    in 2009 : consuted with the libraries for assistance with the project

    Visual resource curator (Paul Miller) developped a set of Microsoft access DBB

    In 2012 : the NEH awarded a SE Grant fot the projet

    James R G. III joined the project then

Identiifying the source : 6500 manuspcrits (identified and cataloged)

a lot a protected by copyright

Catalogin the sources : 

    bibliographic metadata

    Transcribing the primary source 

    not TEI 

    Nota BENE encoding 

    Nota bene collation

    in mode code (source code) in a terminal 

    Backslashes \

    Accessing the nota bene encoding comes with challenges 

    (3.0 in 1988 !)

    accessing NB would require a virtualiszed environment of Miscrosoft from 1988

    So we have to encode in TEI 

    An API ruby usign Nokogiri was developped to support this transformation

    Viewing the TEI XML ws of limited value

    research techniques 

    XSLT 

    styled HTML5 using bootstrap serves as a minimum viable product

    Viewing the encoded text

    Enrich the encoded transcript

    limits : are obvious : 

    reserachers are not encoding

    the developper for the ruby API is not a litterary scholar

    How can this encoding be made collaborative?

    Enriching the encoded transcripts

    - collaborative the encoded and quality control

    Textual criticism is stil not enabled by this approach

    Collation within a Digital SE

    a coolation interface was scoped for the digital edition

    collation features could be extended

    experimental feature can be introduced

    extended UI fetures usign javascript frameworks

    the DE is cureent imp

    solution such as Angular JS and REACT reduice UI to a set of modular components tey also resquire a RESTFUL API

    preservation : ingestion of the critically edited reading texts int he TEI XML

    Lafayette College Libraries is a member of the Project Hydra community

         migration for other systems (Islandora and DSpace) is underway

    modelling TEI ressouces in Hydra ... 

endora // interface in javascript / or oxygen for TEI encoding by reserchers

    yamo or JASON

    I can see how JSON could be the new XML 

    Final talk :

h3. 17.30 Wout Dillen, University of Borås

The Editor in the Interface. Guiding the User through Texts and Images

Wout Dillen (Dixit fellow): http://dixit.uni-koeln.de/fellowships/experienced-researchers/#er1      

Digital scholarly editing 

The editor as guide ! 

a SE is inteded to fulfil 2 contradictory user demands

A. the clear economical selective guiding through the textual mass in such a way that the user can benefit from the editor's insights and competent judgement