Since November 2007, I have been working under the supervision of longtime mentor and colleague Dr. Stéfan Sinclair on a project called Digital Texts 2.0:

Digital Texts 2.0 is an initiative to experiment with applying the principles of Web 2.0 to the realm of electronic texts. We intend to preserve and expose all of the existing qualities of digital texts (rich hypertextual associations, refined encoding practices, analytic affordances, etc.), while enhancing them with additional characteristics provided by Web 2.0 and social networking.

[Therefore,] the Digital Texts 2.0 project is a preliminary attempt to better understand the phenomenon of social networking and how it might be adapted to benefit the ways in which humanities scholars interact with electronic texts.

Read more at the Digital Texts wiki.

As described above, Dr. Sinclair is interested in applying some of the interesting features of current web trends (social networking, folksonomies, web service mashups, ajax interfaces, and an emphasis on interactivity) to the realm of electronic texts. The primary focus on social networking led to the Facebook Platform being chosen as a good starting point for the project. Early prototypes that I wrote in PHP were thus aimed at learning the integration points afforded by the Facebook interface and scaffolding some of the basic functionality. After this brief stage of experimentation, I restarted the application in Ruby on Rails, and linked it to the Facebook Platform with the RFacebook ruby gem.

Since then, successive iterations of the app have been released every 2 to 4 weeks, as new functionality has been requested or imagined, flaws have been identified, and new features have demanded new interface design patterns. Current functionality allows users to:

• Create, edit, and share Texts, Authors, and Collections
• Join Groups organized around a particular theme or topic
• Tag everything in the application
• Comment on Texts, Authors, Collections and Groups
• Browse other Readers profiles and records
• Generate statistics based on records in the application (generated with Google Charts)
• Search and browse search logs
• Lookup and add information from Amazon, Google Books, and soon Freebase

Future versions will further integrate application activity with the Facebook Platform, link records in the database to other web services and resources (libraries, text analysis tools, etc), and offer a suite of import/export tools for managing larger data sets. Additionally, Dr. Sinclair is interested in experimenting with hybrid searches that would allow data drawn from the overlapping properties of authors, texts, and readers to be explored. For example, what are the relationships between the age, gender, education level, nationality, and so on of readers and the authors of the texts they read? What does this information tell us? These and other questions will be explored.

Project management has been handled with Trac, extensive release notes, a dedicated mailing list of beta testers and collaborators, and lots of notebooks. Learning to be a part of a very smart team of people while managing a technical project has been really interesting. The practical side of things has also emphasized the quality and breadth of the open source community as a resource for these kinds of projects. Of course, Rails is open source, but I have had the pleasure of using over a dozen other open source projects during the course of development, from free icon sets to JavaScript snippets to Ruby gems to Rails plugins. All of these have made development more productive, more fun, and the end result more polished and powerful. As an academic project without funding outside of a grant, open source has offered the savings in time and sophistication needed to create a professional application in a relatively short period.

The ongoing project has been a fantastic experience for me. I have had the opportunity to work with a great team of beta testers, explore the Facebook platform, and integrate a Rails app with a variety of web services. I’ve also had free reign to iterate over a series of increasingly sophisticated interface designs. I will continue to contribute to the project until August, and hopefully beyond.

If you’re interested in the project, or would like to become a beta tester, feel free to add the Digital Texts 2.0 app on Facebook.