This paper explores building blocks in extant and emerging social media toward the possibilities they offer to the scholarly edition in electronic form, positing that we are witnessing the nascent stages of a new social edition existing at the intersection of social media and the digital editing. Beginning with a typological formulation of electronic scholarly editions, activities common to humanities scholars who engage texts as expert readers are considered, noting that many methods of engagement both reflect the interrelated nature of long-standing professional reading strategies and are social in nature; extending this framework, the next steps in the scholarly edition's development in its incorporation of social media functionality reflect the importance of traditional humanistic activities and workflows, and include collaboration, incorporating contributions by its readers and re-visioning the role of the editor away from ultimate authority and more toward facilitator of reader involvement. Intended to provide a 'toolkit' for academic consideration, this discussion of the emerging social edition points to new methods of textual engagement in digital literary studies and is accompanied by two integral, detailed appendices: one addressing issues pertinent to online reading and interaction, and another on social networking tools.
Overview
As the online scholarly landscape changes, so too must the tools used to traverse it. The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) Reading Tools provides readers a bridge from online scholarly content to a host of contextual information, to a number of discipline-specific search engines and databases, and to other tools. A lot has changed since it was originally released, such as the rise of Google Scholar as the de facto starting point for many novice (and not-so novice) researchers; the blurring line between desktop and web applications; and the increased professional use of social networking tools and websites. Recently, the University of Victoria's Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL), in cooperation with the PKP, undertook a study to determine the role and value of the existing Reading Tools, particularly in the context of Humanities Computing. The ETCL has also developed a prototype Professional Reading Environment which has been the basis for substantial analysis. Rick Kopak and Chia-Ning Chiang at the University of British Columbia (UBC) have undertaken a broad survey of the online annotation landscape, and have written a proposal for developing an annotation system for PKP software. This paper discusses how, using this research as a base and in cooperation with UBC and the PKP, the ETCL has begun a large-scale redevelopment of the PKP Reading Tools, extending the current toolset to include new social networking and research tools, as well as a robust personal annotation system, making social annotation possible between small groups and the public.
This annotated bibliography reviews scholarly work in the area of building and analyzing digital document collections with the aim of establishing a baseline of knowledge for work in the field of digital humanities. The bibliography is organized around three main topics: data stores, text corpora, and analytical facilitators. Each of these is then further divided into sub-topics to provide a broad snapshot of modern information management techniques for building and analyzing digital documents collections.
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