Interface
It is in some ways unusual to discuss the book as though it were an interface, but the term begins to seem more appropriate when we shift our focus into the discussion of the e-book. An interface is the intermediary technology between a set of services or functions on one side, and a person on the other. For the conventional book, the service consists of the text and its apparatus, and the interface — of paper, ink, binding, typography, and so on. For the e-book, the set of services has the potential to expand in a wide range of directions, from the inclusion of more sophisticated hyperlinks, to audio and video clips, to metadata of various kinds, to datamining processes and their results, to visualizations. Ruecker (2005) points out, for instance, that the e-book's table of contents has the potential to develop into a sophisticated research tool, where the reader can add or subtract elements of interest in order to obtain a dynamic overview of the contents.
Our research into e-book interfaces will include developing prototypes in several directions, from content visualizations, to overview displays coupled with tools for manipulating the displays, to experimental browsers that allow exploration of both collections and content. Our research questions primarily involve remediation and new affordances. That is, what elements of print books are valuable or even indispensable in the new digital context, and what new functions are significant enough to readers and researchers that they should be developed? Furthermore, how should the conventions of reading and scholarship influence the design of the e-book form and function?
We have already been making progress in a number of these areas, with projects for dynamic text playback, for nuanced browsing of XML collections and files — the mandala browser (Cheypesh et al., 2006) — and for making data mining tools accessible to humanities scholars (Ruecker et al., 2006). In addition, members of our team have been working on online tools to support editors and readers of scholarly editions (e.g. Best, Galey, Werstine), and we are working with a wide range of researchers who are actively editing such editions (e.g. Flanders, Schreibman, Siemens).
Interface work often involves technical software and hardware development that are not research contributions, but are needed to answer new research questions. Our methods will help us to obtain a useful academic result without the necessity for extensive development activities. We recognize that there is a research life cycle moving from theory and sketches to interactive prototypes to development projects. By coupling the design research strategy of iterative constructive diagnostic research (Sless, 1997) with approaches based on the affordance strength vector model (Ruecker, 2006), we hope to maximize exploration of novel research questions at the early stages of the life cycle, while avoiding getting drawn into expensive, time-consuming development tasks.
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