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.

I did a couple new things this time around. I’m a big fan of Google Maps and thought it would be cool to embed a map of the various locations we visit in the sidebar of the blog (the long skinny shape of New Zealand helped make this fit!). It was very easy to do. After creating the map, I grabbed the Paste HTML to embed in website iframe source from Google and dropped it into the sidebar.php file of the WordPress Sandbox theme that I had built for the blog. Piece of cake! Check out the map or see it embedded on the blog. It’s a simple thing, but I think it helps to make the country and places more tangible to readers of the blog back home in Canada. I think this is a tiny pointer toward the need for a more cohesive web service for travel blogging. Writing travelogues was my introduction to the blogosphere, and it’s still what I primarily use blogs for. A service that could easily integrate travel data (maps, photos, stories) into a blog would be very useful! The public API’s of Flickr and Google Maps make this just a matter of programming and time, but as such a service doesn’t exist yet (to my knowledge), I have to mark my map in Google, post my photos to Flickr, post my entry in WordPress, then path my entry photos to Flickr. Also, I have to modify the WordPress theme files by hand to embed the results in the sidebar. Kind of a lumpy process.

Speaking of Flickr, the other new thing I did (after adding a similar feature to my website) was add a randomized Flickr badge to the sidebar of the blog, which pulls 10 random photos with the tag newzealand on each page load. This too was a very simple task. Simply use the wizard to generate your badge (HTML or Flash), select whether you would like your photos limited to a specific set or tag, select layout and color options (or none so you can write your own CSS), and you’re done! I dumped all the junk that the generator spits out (ugly HTML tables and verbose CSS selectors) and just grabbed the one line of JavaScript responsible for the communication with Flickr. All the parameters selected in the wizard are appended as a query string to the script URL, and can be edited inline. I embedded the script and tried to edit it to select more than 10 photos, but Flickr doesn’t respond to requests over this limit. No bother – 10′s enough, and the badge adds a little bit of random Flickrness to the blog! Now I just hope Microsoft doesn’t end up buying Yahoo, rebranding Flickr as Windows Live Photo Sharing Utility for Vista Internet Service Pack 2 and breaking the badge

I had fun with the theme. The underlying architecture supplied by Sandbox avoids a lot of the CSS headaches that can go along with blog theming, and allowed me to focus on a minimal, content-oriented theme that complements my recent site redesign. Where the Creative Creature site is dark and rich, Recursive Loop is light and airy, but both maintain the same colour scheme and typography choices. The developers of recent versions of WordPress have implemented a fairly flexible Widget system that allowed me to easily add Tag Cloud and Calendar widgets to the sidebar, both of which I find to be really useful navigation tools.

Let me know what you think! Anything not working quite right? Any posts showing up strangely within the new structure? I already had to tweak entries with Flash embedded in them, but I may have missed other little errors. I’ve got a batch of entries to post that I’ve been writing during a recent trip to the beautiful but internet-sparse South Island of New Zealand, so keep an eye out for them!

My responsibility was to work alongside Matt Bouchard with the design team, consisting of Milena Radzikowska, Piotr Michura and Stan Ruecker to design some JavaScript screen effects and animations to realize the responsive interface they were imagining for the Workbench. An overview and links to this work can be found on the Monk Wiki, and in the Monk client area. I also contributed the (unsolicited) logo for the event, choosing one of the many memorable catchphrases as our slogan (though “It’s more than just a red box” was a close runner-up)!

The event was a lot of fun. Thanks to the culinary wizardry of Maryanne Wynne, we ate like kings (and queens) at every meal (and several times in between). We were also well looked-after by Gary and the rest of the staff at Kramer Pond Lodge. Highlights for me included my introduction to extreme/pair programming at the suggestion of Stéfan and the steak-tearing jaws of Matt Bouchard, the hot tubs (at their varying states of ‘hotness’), and playing baseball and ultimate on the lawn. Oh, and the work was cool!

I’ve posted photos from the event on my Flickr page, which you can view as a set or slideshow. Here’s to next time!

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!

Interactive Matter

www.interactivematter.ca
ROLE: Designer, Blog Admin
TOOLS: XHTML, CSS

Interactive Matter is a collection of academics, industry professionals, researchers, technologists, students, writers, innovators and experimentalists concerned with imagining, creating and critiquing new interactive media: “Interactive multimedia is the new medium and we are just learning to create and communicate through it. Interactivity is not narrative, it is not image, it is not linear. It is more than an art and it is more than engineering. Interactivity is playful, it is like a conversation, and it matters to the arts, humanities, sciences and the new media industry. Interactivity matters now.”

This site is used as a hub for information about the project and its various participants and partners. It also functions as a repository for current information about Interactive Matter’s bid for continued funding from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

The Goethe-McMaster Project

www.goethe-mcmaster.com
ROLE: Project Web Lead, Designer, Programmer, Conceptual Consultant
TOOLS: HTML, CSS, PHP, Flash 8, Flash Video

“German Expressionism in the Classroom is a website aimed at anyone interested in art or German as a private individual or within the field of education. 30 pieces of art taken from the collection housed at the McMaster Museum of Art are introduced as a virtual exhibition. This exhibition is accompanied by materials in both English and German providing background information on the time period, artists, and works of art and by exercises related to the works of art, German language and culture.”

I worked closely with representatives from the McMaster Museum of Art and the Goethe Institut to develop this resource in a short period of time in August and September of 2006. On September 14th, the website went live to accompany the launch of the German Expressionism exhibit at the museum, and has since been widely used by students and teachers of Art and the German language at the high school level.

SatorBase

www.satorbase.org
ROLE: Designer, Debugger, Programmer for certain updates
TOOLS: PHP/MySQL, HTML, CSS

SatorBase is a relational database of literary topoi and their occurrences in texts from 13th to 19th century France. I was contracted to redesign the resource from the ground up, as well as to isolate and fix a number of application errors. Additionally, I worked with Dr. Madeleine Jeay, director of the Sator Society, to add in new functionality to the application.

Hyperlistes

tapor.mcmaster.ca/~hyperliste
ROLE: Programmer
TOOLS: PHP/MySQL, XML/XSL

Hyperlistes is another literary research project created by Dr. Madeleine Jeay of the McMaster Department of French. My role on this project involved translating the core functions of the project from Perl CGI scripts to PHP, and setting up a MySQL database to house the site content, as well as tweaking the functionality of the XSLT transformations.

I developed the project in two stages. First, I designed an XML schema which the client could populate with albums of works, separated into Photography and Imaging sections. Each work can be tagged with an optional Title and Description. This setup allows the client to populate and update their current works without needing to use Flash, and without the need of a developer.

Secondly, I built the interface in Flash. After importing the XML, the interface is populated with Albums, each of which holds a set of works. When an album is selected, the works within it are loaded as thumbnails, to be selected by the user. The fun part was developing the animations which are generated dynamically between image positions. First, the border of the image tweens from the current to the selected image shape and size, then the entire interface shifts to center the new image. When this is complete, the image is loaded in, resolving in from a blur and oversaturation filter. Check out the site to get the effect, as these screenshots only tell part of the story!

JD makes beautiful images, and it was a pleasure as always to work with him on this project. He had a clear vision for the site, and it was fun to work together to get the transitions and effects right to suit it.