Force11 is a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that has arisen organically to help facilitate the change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing. Individually and collectively, we aim to bring about a change in modern scholarly communications through the effective use of information technology. [About Force 11]

Rather than the presentations, I would say that the most valuable aspect of this event are the many conversations you can have with people from different backgrounds: techies, publishers, policy makers, academics etc..

Nonetheless, here’s a (very short and biased) list of things that seemed to stand out.

This presentation describes my recent work in semantic analysis of the acknowledgement section of biomedical research articles, specifically the sharing of resources (instruments, reagents, model organisms, etc.) between the author articles and other non-author investigators. The resulting semantic graph complements the knowledge currently captured by research profiling systems, which primarily focus on investigators, publications and grants. My approach results in much finer-grained information, at the individual author contribution level, and the specific resources shared by external parties. The long-term goal for this work is unification with the VIVO-ISF-based CTSAsearch federated search engine, which currently contains research profiles from 60 institutions worldwide.

I argue that it is precisely the ubiquitous use of attachments that has held up progress in publishing. We have the technology right now to allow the author to write online and have the file saved automatically as XML. All subsequent work on the “manuscript” (e.g. copy editing, QC, etc) can also be done online. At the end of the process the XML is automatically “rendered” to PDF, Epub, etc, and delivered to the end user, on demand. This system is quicker as there are no emails or attachments to hold it up, cheaper as there is no admin involved, and more accurate as there is only one definitive file (the XML) which is the “format of record”.

If you want more, it’s worth taking a look directly at the conference agenda and in particular the demo/poster session agenda. And hopefully see you next year in Portland, Oregon :-)

I had a quick go at it, it’s maybe a bit fiddly to do some of the annotations but the app is definitely feature rich and with lots of potential uses, especially within an education scenario.

Here’s how an annotation webpage would look like using the Google Chrome bookmarklet:

Various other tools for creating annotations are made available too:

See also:

Prism is presented as

… a tool for “crowdsourcing interpretation.” The concept emerged from a decade-long conversation on categories of textual interpretation which took place at the University of Virginia, and specifically from transparency mark-up games designed by Bethany Nowviskie for her Media Studies students and her colleagues in SpecLab.

The concept of crowdsourcing interpretation is definitely a fascinating one; maybe the end result of Prism a little less so, at the moment. Simply merging different people’s highlights can be visually interesting, but at the same time not very useful from a scholarly point of view I think. Overall, it seems to me like an indiscriminate association of possibly very different viewpoints.

..the end goal of Prism is to produce aesthetic provocations, that is, visualizations which provoke further discussion. Prism expands upon current notions of crowdsourcing to allow for more meaningful interaction with “the crowd.” Users interact subjectively with a text and contribute to a collective interpretive energy that has infinite possibilities beyond the highlighting exercise itself

Despite the fact it’s still early days for Prism, it seems to me that this is potentially the beginning of a new research field (cf. this post too: Future possibilities for Prism), so I’m really curious to see how it’ll develop. I have the feeling that just by adding a few more controls (e.g. filtering highlights/annotations by users group, or mechanisms for tagging/categorising passages) the final visualisation of the text could become a really powerful tool for exploration and learning.

Think for example of a classroom scenario: groups of students could focus on different facets of an author, annotate what’s relevant with respect to that facet, and eventually explore what the other groups have annotated in the text (and how it overlaps with their own annotations). All of this could be achieved just by playing with the interactive controls of the final visualization .
Another interesting scenario could be a single-user context: when you study a text, it’s not uncommon to find new elements of interest each time you read the text, maybe because your goals have changed, or simply because you are in a completely different mood. Using an enhanced version of Prism it’d be possible to see the evolution of your notes chronologically, and maybe re-consider them in association to other contextual information you might have stored elsewhere (e.g. about other readings you were doing at the time).

In conclusion: will crowd-sourced interpretations change the way we read texts? We’re not really there yet, but definitely going in the right direction!

Related work

To be fair, I’ve been intrigued by this topic for a long time, although probably with a much less academic interest than the one many people in the digital humanities community often have. In short, I’d say I care more about designing applications that can change the way people read online, rather than taking on biblical text-encoding enterprises that at the end of the day result in just another, more complicated, html page.

So I was happy to see that there’s lots going on in this area outside academia; in this post (which is a work-in-progress) I’ll start collecting a few examples of this kind of digital tools.

Findings

Findings is a “groundbreaking tool for collecting, sharing and discussing clips you find on your Amazon Kindle and from any website on the internet. Just import your Amazon Kindle Highlights with Findings and you can start sharing and discussing them with others instantly”.

The key idea here seems to be that since a lot of the reading we do nowadays is online (or on digital devices) we may as well start sharing the ‘highlights’ we create by using a social network architecture (e.g. share, vote, comment on etc.). The idea definitely makes sense, and, quite interestingly, it reminds us of what used to be common practice in a time when the book (as we know it nowadays) wasn’t yet an established form of writing (check out Robert Darnton: “early modern Englishmen … broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks“)

Small Demons:

Small Demons. The blurb is catchy: “suppose someone took every meaningful detail from all the books you love. Every song mentioned, every person, every food or place or movie title. And what if they did that for all the books everyone else loves, too. The ones you’ve never heard of. Suddenly you’ve got a whole world of seemingly random people, places and things, all gathered in one place. Together they create something vast, wonderful and entirely new. A Storyverse. A place where details touch, overlap and lead you further. To new music to listen to. New movies to watch. Places to visit. People to know. And of course, new books to read. Getting started is simple. Just choose a book. See where it takes you.”

Here there seems to be some level of semantic annotation of the texts, which produces a thick layer of metadata that can be used to create unusual and interesting interconnections among the materials published. Definitely worth keeping an eye on – in particular I wonder how ‘deep’ is the semantic annotation process, and on which scale!

Readmill

Readmill is a “curious community of readers, sharing and highlighting the books they love. Highlight your favorite passages and share them with your reading community. Follow people you like and find out what your friends are reading. Explore a world of reading and keep a list of books you want to read. Read with Readmill for iPad, and sync highlights from Amazon Kindle with the Readmill Bookmarklet.”

The read-highlight-share idea is the same as in Findings (above); the main difference, at first sight, is that this Berlin-based startup is also producing mobile apps (e.g. iPhone, android) that will make the ‘Readmill experience’ much more integrated and, supposedly, powerful. We”ll see!

Quote.fm

Quote.fm is presented as “the best way to discover, read and share great texts that have the power to convey ideas, provoke emotions or change your entire life. It’s all about texts truly worth reading.”

This is another German company that in the spirit of Findings (above) has put up a service for saving and sharing quotations taken from online resources. The site look is quite appealing, there’s no support for Kindle yet by it appears from the Timeline that soon we’ll see a whole bunch of new features on this site..

Read and Note

Readandnote.com system “has the ability to annotate digital versions of books and many types of different assets, add any asset and the capability of linking references through the annotation process. The e-publication suddenly becomes more than a ‘read-only’ document”.

This technology seems very promising; the website talks about supporting iPad and mobile devices too, which is always a plus. Unfortunately there isn’t any demo or screencast available at the moment, but we’ll keep an eye on this (you can sign up to receive news from them if you like).

UPDATE 1/6/12: a video of the software is now available online.

Tailored Texts

Tailored Texts is a “project which allows lovers of language and literature to collaborate in the reading and annotation of original-language texts that are in the public domain”.

The software is very usable and it offers several fairly advanced features, such as categorised annotations (‘definitions’, ‘grammar’, ‘analysis’ etc.), wikis and integrated discussion boards. It may be tailored especially to language students, teachers and translators who need to study a text and/or annotate it collaboratively, but it seems as if it could be used in a number of other contexts too.

That’s all for now..

Which of the ones above will succeed? I’ll try to keep adding pointers to this list as I run into them in the next weeks, so come back for more.

Tip: the recently finished ifBookThen conference had a lot of interesting talks (also, you can read an overview of it on Storify)

You’ll find a good coverage of it also on TechCrunch:

The web application it’s introducing today is dubbed Blerp, and its ambition is to turn the Web into a giant interactive message board by making it possible for visitors to add text comments and multimedia to existing web pages and share them with their friends.

Under the motto ‘layer the web!’, Blerp aims to enable people to enrich web pages with an additional layer of content with the ability to let others join in on the fun at any time. RocketOn is calling the concept Hyperlayers, and if the idea makes you think of social annotation services like Reframe It, Diigo or Fleck, that’s because it’s taking an extremely similar route with Blerp.

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