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

In the months since a 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit New Zealand’s Canterbury province in September 2010, the region has experience over ten thousand aftershocks, 430 above magnitude 4.0. The most devastating aftershock, a 6.2 earthquake under the centre of Christchurch on 22 February 2011, had one of the highest peak ground acceleration rates ever recorded. This event claimed 185 lives, damaged 80% of the central city beyond repair, and forced the abandonment of 6,000 homes. It was the third costliest insurance event in history.

As part of the project, a number of inspiring community-oriented digital resources have been made available, including:

In particular, Quakestudies is going to become a massive federated archive, containing content sourced from the research community and peak agencies involved with the earthquakes. All of this information will be “looked after in perpetuity and be available to approved researchers either now or in future years”. As it is being indexed using a number of approaches (including semantic web technologies too, says Millard) it’ll make available a number of exploratory pathways into these materials – many of them it is not possible to foresee.

This is certainly an inspiring example of the employment of digital technologies to support a large number of people; in particular, it is remarkable how the entire initiative was promoted and coordinated by a team of dedicated people at the University of Canterbury that has managed to become a key reference point for the community in such a difficult time.

From DDH, we certainly want to send our best wishes to the project, and we’re looking forward to using Quakestudies!

Related resources