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
This contribution reflects on the value of plurality in the 'network with a thousand entrances' suggested by McCarty (http://goo.gl/H3HAfs), and others, in association with approaching time-honoured annotative and commentary practices of much-engaged texts. The question is how this approach aligns with tensions, today, surrounding the multiplicity of endeavour associated with modeling practices of annotation by practitioners of the digital humanities. Our work, hence, surveys annotative practice across its reflection in contemporary praxis, from the MIT annotation studio whitepaper (http://goo.gl/8NBdnf) through the work of the Open Annotation Collaboration (http://www.openannotation.org), and manifest in multiple tools facilitating annotation across the web up to and including widespread application in social knowledge creation suites like Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web annotation)
This article considers the role of textual studies in a digital world and reviews the work of a particular group of digital textual scholars. Specifically, the article examines the work of the Textual Studies team at the Implementing New Knowledge Environments project (INKE.ca), a group of digital textual scholars working on user experience, interface design, and information management with the goal of better understanding how reading is changing in the context of digital media. INKE’s work rethinks what the book can become and aims to generate prototypes to be shared on an open-source basis with the public.
In this 2009 article, we present details of the first year work of the INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) research group, a large international, interdisciplinary research team studying reading and texts, both digital and printed. The INKE team is comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefronts of fields relating to textual studies, user experience, interface design, and information management. We aim to contribute to the development of new digital information and knowledge environments that build on past textual practices. We discuss our research questions, methods, aims and research objectives, the rationale behind our work and its expected significance—specifically as it pertains to our first year goals of laying a research foundation for this endeavour.
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