Contexts For Electronic Book Research
More than half of all people living in developed countries make use of computers and the internet to read newspaper pieces, magazine and journal articles, electronic copies of books, and other similar materials. The next generation of adults already recognizes the electronic medium as their chief source of textual information. Our knowledge repositories increasingly favour digital products over the print resources that have been their mainstay for centuries. And those professionals who produce and convey textual information have as a chief priority activities associated with making such information available electronically in ways that meet the standards of quality, content, and functionality that have evolved over half a millennium of print publication.
The movement toward the use of the digital medium is an obvious one, with clear benefits associated with the production, dissemination and reception of the record of human experience, as well as the ultimate societal impact of these processes on our knowledge-based society. But, for all the good we perceive, we also realize that there is much still to know about this new media form. Such knowledge is necessary to the end of ensuring that we make the best use of all that the digital has to offer us.
Questions arise for those who are most expert in this area. What do we really know about the ways in which we interact with these new texts that replace the print artifact and re-present to us the knowledge and experience of the past, as well as deliver the direct-to-digital record of the present? Do we understand the ways in which we interact with these knowledge objects, and the information they contain — and do we understand the impact that the confluence of media formats in these digital objects has on our use of them, such that we may best facilitate interaction with the new digital artifact?
In short, there is much that we still need to learn about the new knowledge machine presented to us by the computer and its digital resources. More specifically, there is at the moment a real need to understand the principles involved, so that we may address the need in our community — and the society we serve — to best interact with the digital manifestations of those representations of the objects recording human experience.
Comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefront of computing in the humanities, text analysis, information studies, usability and interface design — those who are best-poised to understand the nature of the human record as it intersects with the computer — this working group will begin to identify the central issues relating to the digitization of the human record and to act on that identification, to the end of:
- understanding and describing the basic principles of humanistic interaction with knowledge objects (digital and analog alike),
- articulating core strategies for the design of humanistic knowledge objects, especially electronic books, based on this understanding, and
- suggesting basic principles necessary for evaluating and implementing current technologies, and exploring future ones.
Possibilities for human-computer interaction and the electronic book may be examined from a range of interrelated perspectives, which we would approach in several essential ways:
- via a process that seeks to identify, quantify and evaluate print and electronic books in terms of their features and uses,
- via a process that explores the material, symbolic and formal aspects of the book, toward the end of computational modeling, and
- via a process of prototyping computational models and simulations of the book, both literal models and metaphoric.
The work we propose is a natural extension of well-recognized and innovative work by Canadian researchers in the area. It not only builds on important accomplishments, but also promises to work toward making significant contributions to the digital humanities. Canada is well-established as a world leader in the digital humanities, with:
- internationally-recognized professional associations such as the Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI, formerly COCH/COSH, CFHSS society #255),
- research networks such as the Text Analysis Portal for Research group (TAPoR; at McMaster U, UQAM, U New Brunswick, U Toronto, U Alberta, and U Victoria),
- communities which have supported annual conferences in the digital humanities (SDH/SEMI, at the CFHSS Congress) and text analysis (the Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis [CaSTA]),
- a summer institute (the Digital Humanities / Humanities Computing Summer Institute, U Victoria), and
- related research gatherings such as that of the Text Analysis Developers Alliance (TADA, McMaster U) and the interactiveMatters research cluster (McMaster U, Concordia U, U Calgary, and U Victoria).
Canada is also home to a number of high-profile research initiatives related to the understanding and representation of book-oriented materials in electronic form. These initiatives include the Internet Shakespeare Editions (U Victoria), the Orlando Project (U Alberta, U Guelph), the Public Knowledge Project (U British Columbia), and Nouvelles Experiences de la Textualité (NT2, UQAM), among many notable others.
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