For the past few months, I’ve been working on and off on a redesign and interface overhaul of Bitstrips, a social comic creation and sharing application launched by Toronto-based Core Matrix this past spring. Bitstrips allows anyone to create great looking comics and characters with easy to use tools, and share them with their friends and others in the Bitstrsips community. After launching their initial beta, the guys behind Bitstrips wanted to improve the look and feel of their application. To this end, I was hired on to create some design mockups, sort out browser compatibility issues, streamline and improve the site’s HTML and CSS (and push them into line with best practices), consult on the information design and navigation flow of the site, and put together and polish lots of the interface graphics. The latest version takes Bitstrips out of beta and incorporates these and a huge number of other improvements to both the backend functionality and frontend user interface of the site.

Since the site’s successful launch at SXSW, the Bitstrips community has been steadily growing, with over 70,000 comics created so far, and has gained a buzz with numerous mentions in Wired magazine (1, 2, 3), on blogs around the web, and a feature interview on CBC’s Q with Jian Ghomeshi. For their part, the Core Matrix team has been tirelessly adding new content and artwork, fine-tuning their comic, character and scene creation tools, and passionately giving their all to the Bitstrips community.

Bitstrips is free and fun. The best part is creating characters of your friends and putting them in awkward situations in your comics! I’m excited to see how the site grows and develops over the coming months, as the community gets bigger and more involved. The guys at Core Matrix are putting on a Best-of-Bitstrips Awards Party in Toronto on July 16th, so if you’re in town, check it out! Unfortunately, I won’t be in the area, but hopefully I’ll be there for the 2009 edition.

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.

Since the 1990s, there has been an explosion in the availability of “nostalgia” compact discs. Nostalgia CDs are reissued compilations of pre-rock ‘n’ roll era music, especially recordings by swing bands, dance bands, singers, and small jazz combinations. Because this repertory was originally recorded on 78 rpm records, which held about 3-1/2 minutes of music on each side, the producers of nostalgia CDs make numerous aesthetic, practical, and even curatorial decisions as they select, remaster, and package their products. These decisions are also at play for the increasing number of CDs featuring off-air recordings of historic radio broadcasts. The modern technologies of digital recording and the World Wide Web have helped make old music more available than ever: this website addresses the role that CD reissues play in shaping understandings of popular music history-and historical memory more broadly.

In order to bring her research and data to a broader audience, and to develop a set of tools which would facilitate further research, Dr. Baade and I worked together to build Swinging Nostalgia into a fully searchable, highly editable web application. At the site, researchers as well as casual users can search the database to find information about the Artists, Labels, Collections, and Songs from this era, each collated to the others to indicate the popularity, relationships between, and relative importance of each as it pertains to the genre of “nostalgia” releases. Additionally, readers can keep up to date with and contact Dr. Baade as she continues work on the project.

Swinging Nostalgia Home Page

Search Form

Search Results

The site was developed by Creative Creature using the Ruby on Rails web development framework. It also includes a number of features to improve user interaction and ease of use in the administration of the site and application data, including significant use of AJAX techniques, and a cohesive, communicative interface design.

Contributors to the project can add Artists, Labels, and Songs to the database, and associate them through Collections, which in turn contain multi-disc Tracklistings as well as Album Artwork. This data can then be edited and manipulated as the project grows. Furthermore, each element can have Notes and Documents associated with it, to enrich the data with the researcher’s own thoughts and connected materials (links to external URL’s, PDF documents, images, etc.). The result is a dataset which is flexible and powerful enough to offer researchers a venue in which to ask complex questions and develop answers in collaboration with one another.

Administration Interface

Collection Creation View

I hope the site is a useful research tool for Dr. Baade and her colleagues, and a good resource for those interested in learning more about Swing music. I also hope it is the first of many Ruby on Rails web applications I have the pleasure of working on!

Over the past year, I have worked alongside Dr. Stéfan Sinclair, Dr. Madeleine Jeay, and James Chartrand (Open Sky Solutions) to develop a literary research application at McMaster University. The result is a preliminary launch of PBLit (PolyBase Littéraire) (en français).

PBLit is an experimental project that aims to develop strategies for the simultaneous exploitation of multiples databases using a single unified interface. Many resources exist for literary research, but most are only available through their own interface. This makes research across a multitude of resources a time-consuming and learning-intensive task. PBLit offers a model prototype for navigation and research across literary resources, and functions as a proof of concept that multiple resources, in different formats and containing various datatypes, can be utilized simultaneously through an integrated web application.

PBLit (PolyBase Littéraire)

http://tapor.mcmaster.ca/pblit/accueil/
ROLE: Designer, Interface Developer
TOOLS: XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, XSLT, Cocoon, CForms, moo.fx

My role on the project was initially as a graphic designer and interface developer, and grew to include some responsibility for the XML/XSLT development of the project (particularly in the implementation of the CForms, and in the search results display), as well as writing and debugging a portion of the JavaScript, and managing the localization of the application using i18n. Several exciting features were developed to facilitate the usability of the application, including an AJAX Search Suggest mechanism on all search fields, and an Advanced Search form which has been developed to allow for future versions of the application to offer resource-specific search fields to allow users to refine their searches to target specific resources.

I have worked closely with Dr.’s Sinclair and Jeay before on SatorBase and Hyperlistes, and as always it was a pleasure to learn from their years of experience undertaking academic projects. Also, it has been an excellent experience learning from the process and open-source knowledge of James Chartrand and Open Sky Solutions. Thanks to everyone, and here’s to a job well done!