What we did today, Monday April 28, 2014

We addressed our Main Goals as were yesterday outlined for today’s session:

1. Write short concept paragraph describing the publication purpose and design

**Our short paragraph turned into a rather long and detailed document, which is here in its evolving entirety.

2. Begin by doing text analysis of data and do some sample keywording on one specific case so as 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.

1. We’ve published and opened our collaboratively-authored Network[ed] Ecologies Digital Publication Concept Document to allow for further public collaboration. We invite you to view our document and to join our project by adding comments, questions, and critiques.

Excerpts:

When thinking about how we might manifest our Network[ed] Ecologies publication, we thought about the project on multiple (networked) levels: the idea was not only to create a digital publication on the topic of networks but at the same time to rethink the possibilities and potentials of digital and digitally-networked publication.

…a digital publication about networks, which lives in a networked environment, can only be properly presented as a network in itself. Thus this digitally-born publication does not only reside in the network environment of the internet, where any context is only a click on a hyperlink or a search away, but has to be thought of as a network of data in itself – as a networkED publication.

We want Network[ed] Ecologies – A Living Publication to be an open publication and a living conversation. This digital publication, that will use the Scalar publication platform, will house the born-digital content created during Stage One of the Ecology of Networks project – an online exchange that merged original content from an interdisciplinary group of invited professionals with born-digital media content to form an online responsive dialogue – and Stage Two – a live-blogged, live-tweeted, and video-captured in-person symposium at Duke University that featured both our online scholars and new invitees.

Network[ed] Ecologies – A Living Publication will use the affordances of the digital to remediate all of our content – from video and text to tweets and images – into a living but persistent and carefully curated publication, and will  present a multimodal, multiply-interactive, poly-interfaced ‘reading’ experience.

Many parties from author to reader to publisher  have an interest and a stake in the challenge to create an open publication that is still professionally composed, editorially rigorous,  thoughtfully – and provocatively – authored and dynamically maintained. This is our challenge.

2. For our second goal, we scraped the text from our initial essays and conversations and processed those through several open-source digital text analysis tools. Stay tuned for more details about the computer-generated keywords these tests revealed.

Goals for tomorrow, Tuesday April 29, 2014

1. Discuss content & keywords

Do keywords represent an index? a chapter organization?
How fine-grained do we want our annotations to be?
Do we want to do annotations ourselves?
How can we automate annotation? (do we want to?)
Can we open annotation to the readers?
Role of annotations: provide access to content as navigation points
What steps do we need to go through to make the navigation points available?

• Keywords as layers:

1) editor’s keywords that motivate the project at the beginning stages
2) keywords that emerge as content comes in (inductive annotation/coding method of text and video)
3) keywords that are computer-generated (automated? text-analysis) – computer generated analysis should be in dialog with but not replacements for the human-generated

2. Continue discussing how we will accomplish the goals outlined in our Network[ed] Ecologies Digital Publication Concept Document. This is, of course an ongoing evolving discussion.

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