1. Active Group Members
2. Prototypes and Publications
3. Activities

INKE’s Modelling / Prototyping (MP) group designs and implements proof-of-concept projects that bring together the foundational theoretical work of the Textual Studies (TS) team and the interface designs developed by the ID team. M&P further develops the combined ideas of the other two groups by simulating unique models, ideas, arguments, philosophies, and practices in virtual environments.

The main motivation of MP is to understand and extend beyond the features of print-based communicative models through testing and prototyping affordances in digital environments. Establishing the prototype as an argument is a performative and reflective first step towards a fuller application and edification of the ideas explored by all INKE researchers. In INKE’s fourth year, M&P extends its earlier work and continues to approach the digital scholarly edition as a dynamic and social process. This understanding feeds current work on modelling textual relationships (RDF), gaming the edition, modeling the XML-enhanced scholarly collection, and fostering and enabling knowledge communities.

Research Questions:

  1. How do we model and enable context, such as prosopography and placeography, within the electronic scholarly edition?
  2. How do we engage knowledge-building communities within the space of the electronic edition, and capture process, dialogue, and connections in and around such editions?
  3. How much can we play with the definition of the “scholarly edition” in the digital environment before that term no longer defines the kinds of work that takes place within that virtual space?
  4. How can the dynamic digital edition enable users to become specialized contributing editors through work on the edition, adjudicated by the software and by an existing editorial community?

Active Group Members

  • Researchers: Jon Bath, Jon Saklofske, Jentery Sayers, Susan Brown, William R Bowen (Consultative researchers include: Harvey Quamen, Stan Ruecker, Stéfan Sinclair, Brent Nelson, Ray Siemens and postdoctoral fellows Constance Crompton, Scott Schofield)
  • Graduate Research Assistants: Jake Bruce, Mandy Elliott, Michael Horacki, Lisa Goddard, Daniel Powell

Prototypes and Publications

Activities 2009 – 2012

Members of the Modelling and Prototyping group were recruited during the summer of 2011 and were given the opportunity to develop the group’s mandate and relationship to the other INKE teams’ research trajectories during the Kyoto Birds of a Feather Conference.

Following that conference, Jon Bath, Jon Saklofske Susan Brown and Jentery Sayers developed a partial year 3 plan which was meant to facilitate the integration of MP into INKE’s work on the scholarly edition. We began to work towards modelling dynamic editing environments which could be used to engage with and beneficially shape the continuing migration of editorial instruction, production and peer-review into digital environments. Our project plans were motivated by four research questions:

  1. How do we model and enable context, such as prosopography and placeography, within the electronic scholarly edition?
  2. How do we engage knowledge-building communities within the space of the electronic edition, and capture process, dialogue, and connections in and around such editions?
  3. How much can we play with the definition of the “scholarly edition” in the digital environment before that term no longer defines the kinds of work that takes place within that virtual space?
  4. How can the dynamic digital edition enable users to become specialized contributing editors through work on the edition, adjudicated by the software and by an existing editorial community?

We addressed these questions by starting development of an HTML5-based prototype of NewRadial, a web and server- based browsing/annotation tool that would serve as a site for proof of concept argumentation regarding the nature of digital editions (and the incorporation of user-generated content that interacts with the original edition content). The prototype’s front end has been completed, and the server backend is currently being established and tested (as per the adjacent figures).


NewRadial early Java prototype


NewRadial client-side architecture


NewRadial server-side architecture

During the year 3 timeframe, MP researchers delivered three conference papers, two at the Social Sciences and Humanities Congress in Waterloo, Ontario (May 2012) One paper was for CASBC and described the preliminary work being done with our partner, CWRC, toward modelling textual relationships and prototyping a reading environment that leverages RDF. The other paper was for SDH-SEMI and argued that game paradigms lend integrity to social edition processes by providing environment models that could effectively move neophyte editors through the process of increasing their editorial expertise while contributing to actual edition work (see the adjacent figure).


Layered design for “gamed” edition

The third paper was delivered in June 2012 at the Beyond Accessibility conference at the University of Victoria, and not only summarized the ways that early MP initiatives would be extended into year 4′s continued focus on the scholarly edition, but also offered two distinct models for preserving print-based affordances and overcoming constraints in the establishment of dynamic digital editions. The latter two papers will be expanded into article-length papers and submitted for publication before the end of August.

In year 4, M&P will continue to approach the digital scholarly edition as a dynamic and social process to extend and implement the versioning, prosopographical and game-related affordances in the prototypes that we began investigating in year three. The NewRadial prototype will continue to serve as a site for proof of concept argumentation and will be adapted to leverage and output RDF format data and will be tested for compatibility with various databases, including NINES RDF and the ArchBook image repository. Further, the “gaming the edition” work will be extended to incorporate the ID team’s Magic Circle and workflow interfaces. We will also be partnering with CWRC and the University of Alberta Press to investigate the question of how to represent context in the scholarly edition by modeling the interaction between the typically span-oriented semantic markup associated with best practices for digital editions and the traditionally punctive indexing of print-oriented scholarly collections.

Over the remaining years of the INKE project, the primary responsibility of the MP team will be to design and implement proof-of-concept projects that bring together the theoretical work of the TS team and the interface designs developed by the ID team. MP will further develop the combined ideas of the other two groups by simulating unique models, ideas, arguments, philosophies, and practices in virtual environments. In year 5, we will focus on the secondary scholarship of monograph and journals, and will continue to explore social edition paradigms while also developing new prototypes for the organization and function of secondary scholarship in print and digital forms. The focus of Year 6 is on born-digital literature, and many of our current ideas and projects (NewRadial, gaming environments and one of our overarching models for the digital scholarly edition) can be extended to this area as well.