Year Six: Born-digital Literature
Year Five: The Monograph and Journal
Wrkflux
Based on visual interactive workflow, our current phase of the project focused on the creation and customization of workflows. While in the previous version we used a pre-defined workflow structure, the new version, which we called Wrkflux, allows users to create and design their own workflows. By adding this functionality, we are looking for other forms that workflows can be used, such as management processes, editorial processes, personal organization, mind mapping, and even for board game prototypes.
The DH Experience
A cooperative game based on the work of DH practitioners, modeling the experience of researching and publishing in a multi-disciplinary academic environment. In The DH Experience, players collaborate to collect data from around the world, perform research and complete their projects in order to succeed, competing against time and the system inherent to the game.
CiteLens
The current phase of the prototype implements the first stage, an environment that acquaints the user with the body of works referenced inside the monograph being analysed. User-generated sets of references are created with the help of a faceted browser interface, which allows filtering references by bibliographic and functional criteria (e.g. language, date of publication, type of publication, relation to the citing text, etc.). This allows for the users to compare up to three distinct sets of references by visualizing their location and grouping in the citing text.
Year Four: The Scholarly Edition (1 Sept 2012 to 31 Aug 2013)
Multi-touch Variorum Project
Explores the application of multitouch surface technology for improving the comprehension, manipulation, and analysis of variorum editions beyond what has been accomplished in previous digital variorums. The large multitouch display (52-inch, 4k x 2k pixels) we are using in this project provides enough space to open many editions at the same time allowing more than one person to manipulate the information, and enabling social interaction in the same place. The collaborative use of tangible devices in research situations is one of the main goals of this research. In driving towards this end, however, our group has faced issues in two camps: the ability of users to adapt to multiple people concurrently using touch controls; and, less expectedly, the ability of a designer to structure elements on an unconventional screen.
Tangible Workflow
We have already built a prototype of editorial workflow with Orlando Project that runs on computers. Now we are stepping into a phase of tangible workflow that can run on tablets and multi-touch platforms with gestures, which makes workflow more visual and intuitive. We are now making tangible workflow customized for users. The new direction of workflow is to be combined with games.
CiteLens
We are continuing the design and development of CiteLens (formerly known as CiteSight). After delivering the first prototype of the tool to partners at the University College London for user testing, we will resume our work on the two views incorporated in the tool (one for comparison, the other for the contextualization of citations in monographs). Objectives for this year include the development of the contextualizing view and incorporating the preliminary feedback from the user study in the design of the comparison view.
Year Three: The Scholarly Edition (1 Sept 2011 to 31 Aug 2012)
Environmental Scans and Literature Reviews
This year, the ID research team is making an environmental scan of existing digital interfaces of digital scholarly editions
A literature review focusing on the use of digital scholarly editions in the humanities is being conducted to inform the interface design process
CiteSight
We are creating a tool tentatively called “CiteSight,” a visualization tool for the analysis of citation patterns in extended humanist works such as monographs and scholarly editions. Our goal in this project is to extend the citations at the end of the digital scholarly edition into a visualization tool with multiple views, supplementing than the conventional alphabetical list by author’s last name
Workflow Interface for Editorial Process Management
Building on our previous work with structured surfaces, we are also working on a prototype of a workflow interface for editorial process management.
Dynamic Table of Contexts
We are continuing work on the Dynamic Table of Contexts in an effort toward modeling the electronic scholarly edition.
Paper Drill
More work is being done on the Paper Drill
dialR for Repetition
More work is being done on dialR for repetition; specifically, to help the user locate patterns of repetition within a scholarly edition
Multipoint-touch interfaces
We are investigating multipoint-touch interfaces as a way of interacting with the scholarly edition. These interfaces build off our work with structured surfaces.
Year Two: The Corpus (1 Sept 2010 to 31 Aug 2011)
Environmental Scans and Literature Reviews
A literature review and environmental scan of corpus interfaces from print to the web was completed.
An environmental scan of different designs of RTF-based visualizations was completed.
Paper Drill
In the second year, the design for the second prototype of the Paper Drill was completed, and a showcase browser was introduced onto the home page. ID provided UX with two online versions of the Paper Drill. These were compared in a user study conducted at UCL. We continued prototyping a working online tool based on the second design of the Paper Drill. It accesses a custom data source with test data.
Structured Surfaces
Design for three innovative “structured surface” browsing interfaces were also completed. These interfaces provide multiple levels of meaning that serve to support and enrich the data represented on them. We prototyped the interfaces, based on the Stanford Protovis toolkit.
Bubblelines
We created two prototypes of the “Bubblelines” design for comparative visualization of search results across multiple items in a collection. Both are online—one stands alone and the other is integrated into the Voyeur tool suite.
dialR for Repetition
We produced a working version of the “dialR for Repetition” design, which allows users to study repetition using n-grams.
Texttiles
We began work on the 2nd iteration of the online “Texttiles” system for showcase browsing of collections. Texttiles is a rich-prospect browser, which persistently displays all items in a given collection and allows users to organize and manipulate them.
Dynamic Table of Contexts
We began work on the 2nd iteration of the “Dynamic Table of Contexts,” an interface which draws on interpretive document encoding to combine the conventional table of contents with an interactive index. Readers use this interface as a tool for browsing the document by selecting an entry from the index and seeing where it is placed in the table of contents. Each item also serves as a link to the appropriate point in the file.
Year One: The Citation (1 Sept 2009 to 31 Aug 2010)
Environmental Scans and Literature Reviews
An environmental scan of citation drilling tools was completed.
An environmental scan of different designs of citation in print and on the web was completed.
A literature review on citation and its design was completed.
Paper Drill
In this year, we began work on the “Paper Drill,” a system that accepts a seed article, tunnels through a number of levels of citation, and generates a summary report listing the most frequent authors and articles. Users input a representative paper in a field they are unfamiliar with. The system finds the citations in that paper, collect those cited papers, finds the citations in them, and so on down to a depth chosen by the user. The Paper Drill then produces a report that lists the most commonly cited authors and papers in the set, as well as providing links to the articles that are available in full text format. We created a working online prototype. It accessed a custom data source with test data. In June 2010, we began programming the second phase of the design. In creating this tool, we created personas and scenarios of use to inform our design choices. We designed an innovative oil and waterdrop interface for it. We also performed user studies focusing on how readers and writers of academic texts use and understand different citation systems. In a related effort, ID conducted studies into methods of extracting structured citation data from unstructured sources.