Digital Scholarly Editions as Interfaces

Hosted by: Centre for Information Modelling – Graz University

Programme chair: Georg Vogeler, Professor of Digital Humanities

Endorsed by: Dixit

Date: 23.9.2016 - 24.9.2016

Venue: Karl-Franzens-University

Hörsaal 03.01, Universitätsplatz 1, 8010 Graz (Austria)

Registration open!

Please fill out the form: http://goo.gl/forms/lmSHeYgodMf5owOv1

Registration is free of charge!

Book of Abstracts to the Symposium: Book_of_Abstracts

Conference Report

Complete Programme as PDF

Day 1: Friday, 23.09.2016

9.00
Margit Reitbauer (Vice Dean of Research), Georg Vogeler (Chair of Digital Humanities), University of Graz; Thomas Rajakovics, Municipality of Graz
Welcome

Keynote

10.30  
Coffee break           

Session 1: Readability, Reliability, Navigation

Chair: Wout Dillen

11.00
Eugene W. Lyman, Independent Scholar
Digital Scholarly Editions and the Affordances of Reliability

11.30  
Christopher M. Ohge, University of California, Berkeley
Navigating Readability and Reliability in Digital Documentary Editions: The Case of Mark Twain’s Notebooks

ca. 12.30  
Lunch break       

Session 2: Visualisation, Typography and Design I

Chair: Frederike Neuber

14.30  
Elli Bleeker and Aodhán Kelly, University of Antwerp
Interfacing literary genesis: a digital museum exhibition of Raymond Brulez’ Sheherazade
View Slides

15.00  
Hans Walter Gabler, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and Joshua Schäuble, University of Passau
Visualising processes of text composition and revision across document borders

ca. 16.00   
Coffee break

Session 3: Visualisation, Typography and Design II

Chair: Christian Steiner

16.30

Richard Hadden, Maynooth University
More than a pretty picture: network visualisation as an interface for Digital Scholarly Editions

17.00
Shane A. McGarry, Maynooth University
Bridging the Gap: Exploring Interaction Metaphors That Facilitate Alternative Reading Modalities in Digital Scholarly Editions
View Slides

Keynote

18.00  
Stan Ruecker, IIT Institute of Design
Task-Based Design for Digital Scholarly Editions
View Slides

19:00  
Reception

Day 2: Saturday, 24.09.2016

Session 4: How to program the interface

Chair: Martina Bürgermeister

9.00    
Hugh Cayless, Duke University Libraries
Critical Editions and the Data Model as Interface

9.30    
Chiara Di Pietro, University of Pisa, and Roberto Rosselli Del Turco, University of Turin
Between innovation and conservation: the narrow path of UI design for the Digital Scholarly Edition
View Slides

10.00  
Jeffrey C. Witt, Loyola University Maryland
Digital Scholarly Editions as API Consuming Applications
View Slides

10.30  
Coffee break

Session 5: Theoretical implications

Chair: Anna-Maria Sichani

11.00  
Arndt Niebisch, University of Vienna
Post-Human Texts? Reflections on Reading and Processing Digital Editions

11.30  
Peter Robinson, University of Saskatchewan
Why Interfaces Do Not and Should Not Matter for Scholarly Digital Editions

12.00  
Tara Andrews, University of Vienna, and Joris van Zundert, Huygens Institute for the History of The Netherlands
What Are You Trying to Say? The Interface as an Integral Element of Argument
View Slides

12.30  
Federico Caria, University of Rome La Sapienza, and Brigitte Mathiak, Cologne
University
Evaluating digital scholarly editions: a focus group
View Slides

Poster session

Chair: Hans Clausen

13.00  
Narvika Bovcon, Alen Ajanović and Pija Balaban, University of Ljubljana
Designing a graphical user interface for digital scholarly edition of Freising Manuscripts

Elina Leblanc, Grenoble-Alpes University
Thinking About Users and Their Interfaces: The Case of Fonte Gaia Bib

Lunch break

Session 6: User oriented approaches I

Chair: Aodhan Kelly

14.30  
Christina M. Steiner, Alexander Nussbaumer, Eva-C. Hillemann and Dietrich Albert, Graz University of Technology
User Interface Design and Evaluation in the Context of Digital Humanities and Decision Support Systems

15.00  
Jan Erik Stange, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam
How close can we get to the reader? Co-creation as a valid approach to developing interfaces for scholarly editions?

15.30  
Ginestra Ferraro, King's College London, and Anna Maria Sichani, Huygens ING  
Design as part of the plan: sustainability in digital editing projects
View Slides

16.00  
Coffee break

Session 7: User oriented approaches II

Chair: Elli Bleeker

16.30  
Stefan Dumont, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
“Correspondances” Digital Scholarly Editions of Letters as Interfaces

17.00  
James R. Griffin III, Lafayette College
Encoding and Designing for the Swift Poems Project
View Slides

17.30  
Wout Dillen, University of Borås
The Editor in the Interface. Guiding the User through Texts and Images
View Slides

18.00  
Closing

+++ Deadline extended until April 24! +++

23.-24.9.2016

Centre for Information Modelling – Graz University

Conference language: English

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

• Dot Porter (Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Univ. of Pennsylvania)

• Stan Ruecker (Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago)

Scholarly editions intermediate between the texts and their readers, which does not change with their transfer to digital media. Over the past two decades, research on digital scholarly editions (DSE) was deeply engaged with the impacts of the digital medium on the critical representation of texts and the changing conditions for the editor. However, less research has been done on the roles of the readers, or - as they are called in the digital environment - the users. A critical examination of the topic has already been demanded by Jerome McGann in 2001, it was repeated by Hans Walter Gabler in 2010, and was taken up more recently by Patrick Sahle (2013) and Elena Pierazzo (2015). User studies are rare, and systematic considerations of principles of Human Computer Interaction are still marginal in theory and practice of DSE. In addition, the conceptualization of the DSEs as interfaces between machines could be intensified. However, the discourse on DSEs benefits from considering paradigms of interface design, from reflecting on the cultural and historical context of the visual appearance of scholarly editions and their affordances, as well as from examining the interactions between user and resource.  

The symposium will discuss the relationship between digital scholarly editing and interfaces by bringing together experts of DSEs and Interface Design, editors and users of editions, web designers and developers. It will include the discussion of (graphical/user) interfaces of DSEs as much as conceptualizing the digital edition itself as an interface. In this context, we are interested in contributions to the following questions and beyond:

• How can DSEs take full advantage of their digital environment without losing the traditional affordances that makes an edition ‘scholarly’? What is the role of skeuomorphic tropes and metaphors like footnotes, page turn and index in the design of DSEs and concerning the user interaction?
• Do interfaces of DSEs succeed in transferring the complexity of the underlying data models?
• Plurality in representation is a core feature of DSE. How do interfaces realize this plurality? Do we need different interfaces for different target audiences (i.e. scholars, digital humanists, students, public)?
• How can user interfaces of DSEs succeed in transmitting Human Computer Interaction design principles like ‘aesthetics’, ‘trust’, and ‘satisfaction’?
• Citability and reliability are core requirements of scholarly work. Which user interface elements support them? How can we encourage the user to critically engage with the DSE?
• What are the users of a DSE actually doing: are they reading the text or searching and analyzing the data?
• Can we conceptualize machines as users? How can we include application programming interfaces (APIs) in the discussion on DSEs as interfaces?
• Does the development of user interfaces for DSEs keep up with the rising distribution of small handheld devices? Will interfaces on tablets greatly differ from those on computer screens and perhaps encourage a larger readership?

Please submit your proposal for a talk at the symposium until April 17, 2016 to dixit(at)uni-graz.at.

The proposal should not exceed 700 words.

There are funds to reimburse travel and accommodation costs. Please indicate with your submission if you need financial support.

Bibliography:

Drucker, Johanna. 2013. “Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface.” DHQ 7 (1). http://digitalhumanities.org:8081/dhq/vol/7/1/000143/000143.html.

Gabler, Hans Walter. 2010. “Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition.” Literature Compass 7: 43–56. https://www.academia.edu/214152/Theorizing_the_Digital_Scholarly_Edition.

Kelly, Aodhán. 2015. Tablet computers for the dissemination of Digital Scholarly Editions, Manuscrítica 28. 123-140 <http://revistas.fflch.usp.br/manuscritica/article/view/2430>

McGann, Jerome. 2001. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Porter, Dot. 2013. “Medievalists and the Scholarly Digital Edition.” Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing 34. http://www.scholarlyediting.org/ 2013/essays/essay.porter.html.

Rosselli Del Turco, Roberto. 2011. “After the Editing Is Done. Designing a Graphic User Interface for Digital Editions.” Digital Medievalist 7. <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ journal/7/rosselliDelTurco/>.

Ruecker, Stan; Radzikowska, Milena; Sinclair, Stéfan. 2011. Visual Interface Design for Digital Cultural Heritage. A Guide to Rich-Prospect Browsing. Farnham: Ashgate.

Sahle, Patrick. 2013. Digitale Editionsformen. Zum Umgang mit der Überlieferung unter den Bedingungen des Medienwandels. Teil 2: Befunde, Theorie und Methodik. Norderstedt: Books on demand.