Transliteracies Project
Research in the Technological, Social, and
Cultural Practices of Online Reading
UC Multi-Campus Research Group (MRG)
Seed grant ($350,000 from UC Office of
the President and UCSB)
2005-2010
Faculty and graduate students from 7 UC
campuses (in humanities, media arts,
social sciences, computer science)
» Launch
UCSB Conversation Roundtables on
Online Reading, June 2005
Sue Thomas’s report on
the conference:
www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/
explore/publications/newsletters/
newsissue9/thomas.htm
» Discovery
Research
Clearinghouse
“Objects for Study”
Research Reports
Research Papers
» Analysis
History of Reading Group (HORG)
Directors: 2006-2008, William Warner (English,
UCSB); 2008-2009, James Kearney (English, UCSB)
» Analysis
New Reading Interfaces Group
Director: Rita Raley (English, UCSB)
Warren Sack’s Agnostics
» Analysis
Social Computing Group
Co-leaders:
Kevin Almeroth (CS, UCSB)
Jennifer Earl (Sociology, UCSB)
Andrew Flanagin (Comm, UCSB)
James Frew (Bren School, UCSB)
Alan Liu (English, UCSB)
Miriam Metzger (Comm, UCSB)
Graduate-student “Bluesky” group
NSF IGERT Pre-proposal
for social-computing
research/curricular program
» Direction
From Reading to Social Computing
RoSE
Research-oriented Social Environment
An experimental project by Transliteracies
beta site:
spectrum.mat.ucsb.edu:3000
about:
transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu/category/researchproject/rose
RoSE Developer Team
(current Transliteracies “Bluesky” group)
Transliteracies Project Coordinators
Early Modern Data Group
Anne Cong-Huyen, English, UCSB
Chris Hagenah, English, UCSB
Lindsay Thomas, English, UCSB
Dir: Jeremy Snow, History, UCSC
Charlotte Becker, English, UCSB
Eric Nebeker, English, UCSB
(Former coordinators: Lisa Swanstrom, Comp. Lit., UCSB
Kimberly Knight, English, UCSB)
Programmer Group
Ivana Andjelkovic, Media Arts & Technology, UCSB
Salman Bakht, Media Arts & Technology, UCSB
Rama Hoetzlein, Media Arts & Technology, UCSB
Pehr Hovey, Media Arts & Technology, UCSB
Aaron McLeran, Media Arts & Technology, UCSB
Visualization Group
Ivana Andjelkovic, Media Arts & Technology, UCSB
Salman Bakht, Media Arts & Technology, UCSB
Rama Hoetzlein, Media Arts & Technology, UCSB
Lilly Nguyen, Information Studies, UCLA
Metadata Group
Dir: David Kim, Information Studies, UCLA
Charlotte Becker, English, UCSB
Eric Chuk, Information Studies, UCLA
Rama Hoetzlein, Media Arts & Technology, UCSB
19th-20th Century Data Group
Dir: Chris Hagenah, English, UCSB
David Kim, Information Studies, UCLA
Julia Panko, English, UCSB
Greg Pollock, Literature, UCSC
Arden Stern, Visual Studies, UCI
Contemporary Data Group
Dir: Lindsay Thomas, English, UCSB
Eric Chuk, Information Studies, UCLA
Anne Cong-Huyen, English, UCSB
Renee Hudson, English, UCLA
Research Reports Group
Dir: Renee Hudson, English, UCLA
Former dir: Salman Bakht, Media Arts &
Technology, UCSB
[Many others contributed Transliteracies research reports]
RoSE
Research-oriented Social Environment
RoSE is being developed at a seed-funding level as a working platform stocked
with a representative set of data/metadata and a sample set of interfaces,
data visualizations, and other end-user experiences.
It is a conceptual demo -- robust enough to suggest what is possible, but still
malleable enough to be open to critique and revision.
It is a hands-on platform for thinking about some of the combined
philosophical and technical issues that would need to be confronted if RoSE
were to be implemented as a production-scale system.
These issues include (the topics of our breakout sessions):
Expertise and networked public knowledge
Data-mining and visualization of social networks
Information credibility
Fluid ontologies and metadata for social and historical research
Online reading and research environments.
RoSE
Research-oriented Social Environment
cument-centric
RoSE creates a convergence between
and
knowledge
socially-network
Document-centric Approach
Journal published through Open Journal Systems (OJS)
http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs
Document-centric Approach
Collex (Collection View)
http://nines.org/
Document-centric Approach
U. Victoria PReE (and REKn) Project (functional demo),
Ray Siemens et al. (Electronic Textual Cultures Lab)
Document-centric Approach
CommentPress pre-print publication of Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s Expressive
Processing on Grand Text Auto in 2008
http://grandtextauto.org/2008/01/22/expressive-processing-anexperiment-in-blog-based-peer-review/
Document-centric Approach
WorldCat Identities
http://www.worldcat.org/identities/
Document-centric Approach
“On the Margins of Scholarship: Repositories, Web 2.0
and Some Scholarly Precedents”
Richard M. Davis, U. London Computer Centre
http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/2/2/OR08_Presentation_Richard_Davis.pdf
Social Network Approach
Academia.edu
http://www.academia.edu/
Social Network Approach
Visual Bookshelf in Facebook
See Transliteracies Research Paper:
“Social Book Cataloging: Humanizing
Databases” by Renee Hudson and Kimberly
Knight
LibraryThing
Document-centric Approach
+
Social Network Approach
ConceptVista
www.geovista.psu.edu/ConceptVISTA
Mark Gahegan, et al., "Connecting GEON: Making
Sense of the Myriad Resources, Researchers and
Concepts that Comprise a Geoscience
Cyberinfrastructure," Computers and Geosciences
35 (2009): 836-54
RoSE's Premise
» People seeking knowledge do not
necessarily want to go to either a
document (a "document-centric"
approach) or a person (a "social- network"
approach) as their first point of access-though they will take either.
» More ideal is an online environment that
allows users to seek out documents and
people in the context of relationships
between the two (e.g., of authorship,
reception, affiliation, recommendation,
sponsorship, commentary, rebuttal, etc.).
» In such an online environment, there
would be no documents sitting in virtual
“libraries” as opposed to people joining
“communities.” Instead, documents,
authors, editors, publishers, and readers,
annotators will be interlinked in combined
orbits of knowledge—i.e., an integrated
“social-document graph.”
Unique Features of RoSE
» RoSE allows for fine-grained relationship types. Not every person or every document is just a
"friend.”
» RoSE's social network includes historical or "dead" people, who have their own profile pages.
After all, the nature of true research is that it does not respect a natural divide between the living
and the dead. Its "longitudinal" horizon is much more extensive.
» In RoSE, some documents will have profile pages.
» Though not possible without implementation-scale funding (or partnering with other projects),
RoSE envisions using data-mining to simulate agency on the profile pages and "walls" of historical
people (and influential documents).
» Imagine, for instance, that Shakespeare's page could be refreshed with content drawn from
his writings or those of his followers, scholars, etc., in response to breaking new research or
recent news events.
» Or imagine that the U.S. Constitution had its own profile page and wall, so that yesterday’s
Supreme Court decision could trigger on the Constitution’s page--through data-mining of
related people and documents--“learned commentary” about that decision.
Fine-grained Relationships
Historical People
Document Profile Pages
Visualization Possibilities
Future Challenges
Input
Partnering with full-text repositories
Algorithmic harvesting
“Expert” vs “folksonomic” input
Ontologies
Scale
“Knowledge”
Output
Visualizations (informational & “poetic”)
Metadata
“Narrative”
Exposure of XML, RDF datapaths for third
party data-analytics and visualization
Metrics
Annotation and Authoring
RoSE
Research-oriented Social Environment
» You want to know something. You look in RoSE to spot a cluster of
evolving relationships (whether of authorship, trust, influence,
controversy, etc.) between the people and the documents that seems
to have defined the current knowledge-scape on that topic. So you go
there--to that hive of knowledge relationships--to learn.
» If you want, you can move the time slider back and forward to see
how the relationships looked then and now.
» Then it comes clear: what you know and still do not know, and who
or what next to research, to read.