What we did today, Sunday April 27, 2014:

Florian Wiencek and I (Amanda Starling Gould) started our PhD Lab Network_Ecologies Scalar design project ‘residency’ today by inhabiting the lab and adopting it as our home base for this week’s open working meetings. This is stage three of the Network Ecologies project whereby we curate our born-digital and our in-person conference content into a digital publication using the Scalar publication platform.

Our discussions began today by talking about data, data relations, keywords, and content, and by brainstorming an architecture and infrastructure for their digital presentation.

Notes from our meeting:

Our First steps: Begin with the data

1. We’ll investigate our data and how we’d like to make it explorable  (what layers of data do we have as basis for the publication and how should the ‘reader’ to be able to interact with the data?)
2. We’ll investigate the relationships: relationships between the text, relationships we want to bring out, relationships we want to create
3. We’ll brainstorm how we can use digital tools to aid our investigations and to create new data for our digital publication

Next Steps: How do we curate, present, (ab)use, open, provoke, and interact with that data?

1. We’ll brainstorm possible architectures for creating a network from these
2. We’ll think about how we can curate further by adding annotations (more data)
3. We’ll think about how we mobilize the affordances of digital publication platforms – and Scalar in particular – to  integrate interaction into the ‘reading’ experience
4. We’ll map out our possibilities for  various reading paths?

We chose Scalar precisely because it encourages various ‘reading’ paths. It allows for a reader to intentionally or unintentionally slip into another content path. We plan to build the following navigation paths:

-keywords as navigation element, as what I call a ‘slipping point’
-media – including text AND annotations as slipping points
-A & F devise a more traditional – a more “authored” reading path as scalar allows

Questions to keep in mind as we work:

• What would be desirable as a digital reading/interaction interface for a networked publication?
• How can we mobilize and/or co-opt digital (analysis-) tools in the production of our digital publication?
• What is the role of the editor in this type of project? We are doing fundamentally different work here as digital publication editors. We are authoring data – and data layers (e.g. metadata), relations, infrastructure, architecture, interaction, annotation… How does this define our role?
• Digital curation as filtering – what are our filters? What role do our filters play? And what is at stake here vis-a-vis digital publication?
• Our data is digital and we want to remember that at every stage. How can we best do this? How does thinking digitally alter/enhance the digital publication? How does thinking digitally challenge the idea of publication writ large?

Goals for tomorrow, Monday April 28, 2014:

1. Write short concept paragraph describing the publication purpose and design
2. Begin by doing text analysis of data and do some sample keywording on one specific case
   1. We want to think about how we might use the digitality of the medium to digitally analyze our data. We want to integrate digitality at all stages.
   2. If we want to create a keyword navigation structure, we can think about keywords from the human perspective and can use digital text analysis methods so as to see the keywords a computer-perspective might generate.
3. Think about what it means to think about human-created keywords vs computer-generated keywords
4. Compare our human-perspective text analysis methods and those deduced by the computer-perspective

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asg