It’s good to hear that our annotations can include links to other web pages. Might they also include images? I’m annotating the war between the English and French. As you might imagine, it would be useful to provide campaign maps and some of the many images I’ve found.
I am pleased to announce that there is now stuff to play with.
A part of the Esposizioni, the part that has been most thoroughly encoded so far, has been put up. From this rather large chunk (I’m guessing roughly 175 modern print pages), we have built an index of people’s names. Now, this index must be verified, and we need your enthusiastic help.
Not many people besides the project’s participants read this blog, so on Monday I’ll compose an email to be sent out (with modifications as you see fit) to various pertinent mailing lists. I’ll be happy to send it out to Humanist and Digital Medievalist lists. Anyone else willing to forward it along to colleagues or lists? If so, would you please let me/us know which lists you’re going to cover?
The project’s current status is critically important for a smooth interaction with it. For the moment, most of VHL’s stuff (everything except for this weblog and a discussion forum, about which below) currently lives on the development server of the Scholarly Technology Group here at Brown. It is very much a work in progress. At any time, it may simply not work, or work in unexpected ways. If you’re really lucky (?), you could happen upon a moment when one of us is working on the site, and the same page loaded twice a minute apart could well be completely different the second time around!
Believe it or not, however, this isn’t the most exciting part. The exciting part is this (n.b.: don’t use Internet Explorer to look at these):
Please note: the annotation engine, built by Paul Caton, is not quite ready for use yet, and we will not be using it for verifying the index. When it’s ready, we would like for the annotators with sufficient access privileges to focus on their individual research, or that done with a small group of people on a specific issue. It would be beneficial for projects being researched by a larger group to be discussed on the forum, so as to alert the public and perhaps increase the level of interest and participation.
Thoughts?
Okay, so we’ve got some problems. That’s why I wanted feedback — thanks to all who responded.
The problem is this: Internet Explorer is notoriously bad at interpreting CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, the language that tells your browser how and where to display things). CSS is a standard that has been around for years; all other browsers conform to it, but IE doesn’t. Why? Because it’s Microsoft, no other reason. I am biased, it’s true; but it’s also true that Microsoft designers should get it together and un-break their software.
Rebecca’s comment about Firefox 1.0 does give me pause. I think I know how to fix it, though, and will do so momentarily.
Because there are now many browsers available for download at no charge, all of which interpret CSS correctly, I don’t think it’s practical to spend too much time fixing the IE bugs. I will look into it, to be sure; but it’s likely to require more time than we have. I spoke to Paul about this yesterday, too, and he agreed: for now, we should work with standards-compliant software and make things work there; then, if we still have the time and money, we can go back and fix the IE bugs. Meanwhile, if you have a chance, please look at the prototype again with Mozilla/Safari/Firefox/your non-IE poison, and let me know if there are any more problems.
Dear all,
It’s just a shell so far, and its aesthetics are not set in stone: right now we’re mostly working on functionality. But I’d like to get your feedback, from a user’s perspective.
The prototype is here. I’m pointing you to the login page, but the login engine doesn’t work yet, so you don’t have to worry about having a username and password. Just play around with the menus up top, and let me know what you think.
All the texts links lead to one dummy table of contents, and all the index links – to a single dummy index. The links from the entries in the index will eventually lead to a page with a list of the places where the name appears.
The main question I have is: is this intuitive? Does the design itself make sense? If you the user have a question about the functionality of the tools on the site, is it obvious where to go to get an answer?
UPDATE. The first bug report has come in: the site doesn’t seem to be working on browsers running under Mac OS 9. So please look at the prototype using either Mac OS X, or a Windows machine. As always, please let me know if it doesn’t work for you. If you’re submitting a bug report, please include the browser you’re using, the version of that browser, and your operating system.
Things are starting off a bit quiet here, not least because most participants are still on vacation, traveling, moving states and the like. Perhaps this is a good time to talk about some general theory.
I saw a call for papers recently that prompted me to pick up some of Edward Hall’s writing. Beyond Culture looks very interesting, although because of time constraints I only read the first couple of chapters; and Understanding Cultural Differences, although not as relevant, has a few good quotes in the introductory section. He cowrote this one with Mildred Reed Hall.
p. 3: “It is possible to say that the world of communication can be divided into three parts: words, material things, and behavior. Words are the medium of business, politics, and diplomacy. Material things are usually indicators of status and power. Behavior provides feedback on how other people feel and includes techniques for avoiding confrontation.”
The authors talk of monochronic vs. polychronic time. This, on p. 13: “Monochronic time means paying attention to and doing only one thing at a time. Polychronic time means being involved with many things at once. Like oil and water, the two systems do not mix. […] Monochronic time is divided quite naturally into segments; it is scheduled and compartmentalized, making it possible for a person to concentrate on one thing at a time.” American business, the Halls say, is dominated by monochronic time.
In contrast, “[p]olychronic people live in a sea of information. They feel they must be up to the minute about everything and everybody, be it business or personal, and they seldom subordinate personal relationships to the exigencies of schedules or budgets.” (p. 16)
We’ve all heard this complaint, which is becoming more and more common: too much information. It’s difficult to concentrate on anything at work. We’d like to easily juggle twenty tasks at any one time, but that wears you out quickly.
Academic pursuits, especially ones that happen largely online, are no exception to this trend. There are always too many papers to read and web-based projects to play with – so much output by smart people whose work is interesting and relevant to our own! Being constantly bombarded by useful and potentially useful information through weblogs, mailing lists and other happenstance, it’s difficult to carve out even an hour a day to, for example, write. Because writing something intelligent and original involves knowing your own opinion, and that requires us to know where the polyphony in our heads stops and our own voice begins. Plus, a cup of tea or what have you, and some peace and quiet.
At VHL, we’re working on creating a place online where scholars will be able to annotate several-hundred-year-old texts. Web sites, generally speaking, don’t need to specifically accomodate people whom the Halls characterize as monochronic. Information is presented in relatively easily digestible chunks, and you’re invited to print out longer articles. In the Editing House (which is what I’ll call the Virtual Editing House from now on, it seems less clunky), you will likely be working exclusively online with material of a contemplative nature.
I wonder how people will end up using it. Will they grab their nearest copy of Boccaccio’s Esposizioni, curl up with it in an armchair, write down their annotations on paper and then only sit in front of a computer for long enough to type in the annotation? Or will they collaborate with each other via a (pipe dream alert) chat medium? Perhaps they’d even use something like SubEthaEdit to annotate texts together? Academic reading and thinking tends to be a monochronic activity, web browsing – polychronic; which one is literary annotation, and will the Editing House encourage a positional change on this particular spectrum?