A Comparison of Development Platforms for Social Network Data Visualizations

This report explores several software development platforms that may be used in developing web-based data visualizations. This report particularly focuses on comparing the suitability of these platforms for developing dynamic social network and document visualizations for ProSE (Professional Social Environment), the social network environment developed by the Bluesky Group of the Transliteracies Project. Adobe Flash (www.adobe.com/products/flash), Adobe Flex (www.adobe.com/products/flex), OpenLaszlo (www.openlaszlo.org), and Processing (www.processing.org) are examined herein. These platforms are first described in general terms in the Overview section, and then they are compared in terms of several factors, such as licensing and cost, accessibility, and ability to interface with databases.
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Document Database Integration for the Professional

Social Environment (ProSE)

ProSE (Professional Social Environment) is a social network environment developed by the Bluesky Group of the Transliteracies Project. While online reading interfaces such as Professional Reading Environment (PReE) being developed by the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory (ETCL) provide sophisticated access to data derived from documents in a professional or scholarly field, ProSE provides access to the social network connected the field. ProSE models social networks in a way that seamlessly combines professional readers and writers, both contemporary and historical. Consequently, ProSE is designed to populate its social network database from existing databases within one or more fields of study to supplement user-created entries. This report describes the following databases, which may be integrated into ProSE:

• English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA): a database of seventeenth-century broadside ballads, created by the Early Modern Center at UC Santa Barbara.


• Early English Books Online (EEBO): a database of text images from 1475-1600.


• Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP): coding of the full text 25,000 works in EEBO.


• The Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn): a database developed at ETCL consisting of primary and secondary sources related to the Renaissance.


• The Iter Bibliography: a bibliographical database for articles, essays, books, dissertations, encyclopedia entries, and reviews pertaining to the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400-1700).

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The History of Reading Group (a Transliteracies research working group) is hosting a one-day, interdisciplinary conference that will provide a forum for sharing recent research findings in the history of reading, with an eye toward investigating the technologies that shape reading as a social experience. The keynote speakers will be Adrian Johns (University of Chicago) and Elaine Treharne (Florida State University).

Sponsored by the University of California’s Transliteracies Project and the IHC’s History of Material Texts RFG.

Conference Schedule
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Summary:

CommentPress was developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book as part of their ongoing experiments with “networked books”. First instituted in 2006 as part of McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H3ORY 1.1 publication, the software was developed to work with WordPress and intended to reconfigure the nature of blog discussions. CommentPress allows respondents to post comments in the margin of the text, on a paragraph-by-paragraph or “whole page” basis. This breaks down the top-down hieararchy typical of blogs whereby a main post is positioned vertically above any commentary. Instead a reader may view the text and commentary at the same time.

Version 1.0 of CommentPress was released to the general public in July 2007 and the software has been used to generate discussion around Master’s Theses, scholarly articles, and books. (more…)

Co-sponsored by the UCI Software Culture Speaker Series and by the Transliteracies Paradigms Speaker Series – Thursday, April 10, UC Irvine

On Thursday, April 10, McKenzie Wark visited UC Irvine for a series of talks and interviews that was co-sponsored by Transliteracies. While there, he gave lectures on his projects GAM3R 7H3ORY and “totality.tv” and was interviewed about his experiences publishing GAM3R 7H3ORY online with CommentPress.

McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born writer on media theory, critical theory and new media. Among his best known work is a project with the Institute for the Future of the Book, a specially designed site that combined Wark’s interest in experimental writing techniques in networked media with his exploration of “Gamer Theory”. Wark is the author of seven books, among them A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press, 2004), Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace (Pluto Press, Sydney, 1998), The Virtual Republic (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1997), and Virtual Geography (Indiana University Press, 1994). He is Associate Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College,
New School, New York.

On CommentPress: Interview with McKenzie Wark: Kim Knight had an opportunity to sit down and talk with Wark during his UC Irvine visit. The interview is available for public download.

Full Video: .mov | .wmv

GAM3R 7H3ORY Talk:

Abstract: If game theory was objective, rational, abstract, then gamer theory is subjective, intuitive, particular. If game theory started with the self contained agent, like a prisoner in a cell, looking out at the world, then gamer theory wonders how the agency of the gamer comes into being as something distinct in the first place. The rise of the computer game as an emergent cultural form calls for an approach to cultural theory that might emerge organically out of the experience of game play. In an era in which many aspects of everyday life seem increasingly game-like, one might well ask what relation computer games have to this agon of the everyday. Perhaps computer games present ethos of the digital world in its pure form, as place where the ‘playing field’ really is level, where the rules really seem to be fair. Perhaps the computer game is the almost-utopian double to a world made over as a gamespace.

(Available via password to Transliteracies members only.)

Full Video: .mov | .wmv

Part 1: .mov | .wmv
Part 2: .mov | .wmv

totality.tv Talk:

Abstract: The Situationist International (1957-1972) was arguably the last of the historic avantgarde movements. While their work has been recuperated variously as art history, cinema, architecture or political theory, their avowed goal of superseding all of these separate forms escapes the academic division of labor. In this presentation I want to discuss both some neglected aspects of the Situationist legacy that might be relevant to today and also to present the website I have created (together with Chris France and Kevin C. Pyle) for work on the Situationist International at http://www.totality.tv

(Available via password to Transliteracies members only.)

Full Video: .mov | .wmv

Part 1: .mov | .wmv
Part 2: .mov | .wmv

Friday, 28 December

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Missouri, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Association for Computers and the Humanities (full abstracts online)

Session organizer: Rita Raley, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara

1. “Tag Clouds: Reading the Poetic Interface,” Jeremy H. Douglass, Univ. of California, San Diego

2. “Toward a Semantic Literary Web: Three Case Histories,” Joseph Paul Tabbi, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago

3. “Reading Shaw’s Legible City,” Elizabeth Swanstrom, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara

4. “Reading the Margins of The Magic Book,” Sarah Jane Sloane, Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins

5. “Texts in Virtual Contexts: Reading Scholarly Work in 3-D Environments,” Victoria E. Szabo, Duke Univ.

Working bibliography of the Transliteracies Social Computing research group. This bibliography was created by research assistants Monica Bulger and Katrina Kimport, and will be expanded as the Transliteracies project continues. See also the Online Literacy Skills Bibliography and the History of Reading group’s bibliography. Objects for Study in the project’s Research Clearinghouse contains annotated citations of a wider range of related materials (including web, hardware, software, historical, and artistic resources as well as selected items from this bibliography).

Social Computing Bibliography

Summary:
Interface ecology is a theoretical framework for the study of relationships between interfaces; its objects range from social to computer interfaces. The practice of interface ecology is characterized by three intertwined objectives: the analysis of interfaces as cultural artifacts from an ecosystems approach, the production of systems and interfaces that elevate the role of human expression, and the translation between disparate cultures and disciplines. This approach was first theorized by Andruid Kerne through his own interdisciplinary work in performance art and computer science at New York University (1997-2001). He has published on interface ecology primarily within computer science and digital art forums from this period to the present. Five years ago, Kerne established the Interface Ecology Lab at Texas A&M University. (more…)

Thinking at the Interface: A Review of the 2007 HASTAC Electronic Techtonics Conference

Summary

From April 19th-21st, 2007, HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) held the “Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface” conference at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. It marked the culmination of the In|Formation Year, a year long mashup of public programming, technological innovation, and interdisciplinary discussion on the humanistic dimensions of technology. “Electronic Techtonics” brought together a variety of perspectives on the material interface and itself served as an interface, in the broader sense of the word, between a broad range of disciplinary approaches. The concepts in circulation ranged from newly proposed theories for the interface, to the exploration of new interfaces, to a critical cultural analysis of how interfaces are emerging, operating, and being deployed. The following report summarizes some of the key panels and events at the conference; and also reflects on their implications for the Transliteracies Project. (more…)

9 am – Welcome and Opening Remarks

• Rita Raley (.mov | .wmv)

9:15 am – “On Reading Software”

• Noah Wardrip-Fruin (.ppt | .mov | .wmv)

9:45 am – Gaming

• Ayhan Aytes, “agoraXchange: Writing the next Constitution” (.mov | .wmv)
• Michael Treanor, “The Rhetoric of Newsgaming” (.ppt | .mov | .wmv)
• Irene Chien, “Reading Katamari Damacy.”
• William Huber, “Interface, Play and Performance in the Virtual Spaces of Final Fantasy XI” (.mov | .wmv)
• Discussion (.mov | .wmv)

12:00 – 1:00 pm – Lunch

1:00 – Text, Type, Interfaces

• Kim Knight, “Cognition and the Eclecticism of Interfaces” (.ppt | .mov | .wmv)
• Lisa Swanstrom, “Reading as Gathering” (.ppt | research report | .mov | .wmv)
• Kate Marshall, “New Reading Topographies” (.mov | .wmv)
• Brooke Belisle, “Reading Interfaces: NewsReader and Valence” (Valence research report | News Reader research report | .mov | .wmv)
• Discussion (.mov | .wmv)

3:30 – 4:00 pm – Break

4:00 pm – Review of Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface” (HASTAC report)

• Nicole Starosielski and Irene Chien (research paper | .mov | .wmv)

4:30 pm – Presentation of Vectors Proposal “Unbound: An Alternative Genealogy of the Reading Interface”

• Ayhan Aytes, Brooke Belisle, Nicole Starosielski, Lisa Swanstrom (.pdf | .mov | .wmv)

5:00 pm – “Transliteracies and Social Computing”

• Alan Liu (.mov | .wmv)

5:30 pm – Vectors for Past, Present, and Future Research

• Group discussion led by Rita Raley and Nicole Starosielski (.mov | .wmv)

7:00 pm – Dinner (off site)

Paradigms Lecture 2—Thursday, May 3rd, 4:00-5:30, South Hall 2635, UCSB

On May 3, 2007, Andrew Elfenbein presented the second lecture in the Transliteracies Project’s Paradigms’ Lecture Series: “The Humanities and the Science of Comprehension.”

PowerPoint Presentation

Full Video: (.mov) | (.wmv)

Video by Sections:

Section 1: Introductory Remarks by Alan Liu
(.mov) | (.wmv)

Section 2: Overview; Traditional Criticism; Enter Cognitive Psychology; Some Possible Caveats
(.mov) | (.wmv)

Section 3: Source Monitoring; Failures of Monitoring; Correlation to Literature?; Result?; Medium Blindness; How Can Medium Not Matter?; Implications
(.mov) | (.wmv)

Section 4: Reader Memory; Causal Density; Implications?; “Past the Middle Effect”; Online Effects; Example; Event Indexing Model; Effects; Relevance?
(.mov) | (.wmv)

Section 5: Reading and Social Psychology; Implications; Trait vs. Situational Models; Reading and Belief; Disarticulation of Levels of Processing; Overvalorization of the Situation Model; Overvalorization of Textbase; On Improving Online Reading; Transliteracies Framework; What Determines Cognitive Interest; Hypermedia Reading; Search the Reader; Defaulting; On-Line Monitoring of Hypermedia; Off-line Effects;
(.mov) | (.wmv)

Section 6: Discussion
(.mov) | (.wmv)

• Andrew Elfenbein, Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, has been a leader in introducing the perspectives and methods of recent cognitive science to the study of literary texts. His important article on this topic, “Cognitive Science and the History of Reading,” appeared in PMLA 121.2 (2006) 484-500. (Read the Transliteracies Research Report about this article.) Elfenbein is an affiliate member of the U. Minnesota Center for Cognitive Sciences

1:00 PM – Greetings and brief self-introductions
2635 South Hall, UCSB
Bill Warner (English Department, UCSB).ppt

1:30 PM – 1st Session: Old Media/ New Media
Alison Walker (English Department, UCLA)(.ppt)
Joshua Neves (Film and Media Studies, UCSB)(.doc) (.pdf)
“History of Reading, a Media Studies Perspective” (.ppt) byLisa Gitelman (Program in Media Studies, Catholic University)

3:00 PM – 3:30 Break

3:30-4:20 PM – 2nd Session: Reading and Modernism and S/F
Robin Chin (English Department, UCSB) (.ppt)
Mark Goble (English Department, UC Irvine)
Lisa Swanstrom (Comparative Literature, UCSB) (.ppt) (.doc) (html)

4:20-5:30 PM – Tech Show-and-Tell on an “open laptop”
(Giles Bergel, Bill Warner, Lisa Swanstrom ….)

8:00 PM – Dinner at Opal Restaurant and Bar, 1325 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93101; 805-966-9676

9:00-10:00 AM – Overview of Transliteracies (.ppt) by Alan Liu (English, UCSB)
30 minutes; discussion 30 minutes

10:00-11:20 AM – 3rd Session: Interfaces and the Augmentation of Reading
Bill Warner (English Department, UCSB)
Clifford Siskin (.jpg 1) & (.jpg 2) (English Department, New York University)

11:30-12:30 AM – Discussion of terminology: let’s define our terms (please); discussion led by Paula McDowell (.doc) (English Department, New York University)
Reading, interface, literacy, print culture, accommodation, augmentation, reading machine, interactivity, multi-media reading, etc.

12:30 – 2:00 Lunch break and brisk walk
Lunch at 1PM at Café Buenos Aires, 1316 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA; 805-963-0242

2:00-4:00 – 4th Session: History of the Book: Directions for Research
Carol Braun Pasternack (English Department, UCSB) (.ppt)
Giles Bergel (English Department, UCSB)
Jim Kearney (English Department, UCSB)
Paula McDowell (English Department, New York University)

4:00-4:15 – Coffee break

4:15-5:15 – Discussion, or where do we go from here?

5:15 – Pre-dinner walk about the town
7:30 PM – Dinner at Fresco at the Beach, 901 East Cabrillo Boulevard, Santa Barbara, CA 93103; 805.963.0111

*Important Note: Do not go to the Fresco’s on State Street! Our dinner reservations are for Fresco at the Beach!

Summary:
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) uses the term “the semantic web” as an umbrella identifier to refer to a number of initiatives that enable developers and archivists to add rich, meaningful metadata to digital resources. According to the W3C, the major reason for theses initiatives to tag information with explicit meaning is to make “it easier for machines to automatically process and integrate information” [1]. The semantic web adds depth to the existing web protocols running over the application layer of the internet without involving any changes to its more basic architecture. Currently, the main feature that organizes the web is the “link”—any document (or resource) can link to any other. Additionally, each link is coupled with a method (or protocol) to present the resource to the user or application that followed that link (e.g., by clicking on it). That is, the web in one sense is completely non-hierarchical and unstructured. The only structural meaning of links between two web pages (or other resources) is simply that one of them refers to the other (and possibly vice versa); all other meanings are entirely contextual and must be interpreted by humans. The goal of the semantic web is to provide a richer structure of relationships to define formally some of the meanings that link resources. And in particular, to provide an extensible uniform structure that can be easily interpreted by search engines and other software tools. The W3C describes a number of potential practical applications that could make use of semantic web technologies, including enhanced search engines for multimedia collections, automated categorization, intelligent agents, web service discovery, and content mapping between disparate electronic resources [2]. (more…)

Summary:
Collex is a tool developed at the University of Virginia’s Applied Research in Patacriticism lab (ARP) and currently operated in conjunction with NINES (Networked Interface for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship). Described as an “interpretive hub,” (Nowviskie) Collex acts as an interface for nine different peer-reviewed, scholarly databases. The interface allows users to access all nine databases in one search, while results retain the unique characteristics of each individual source. Additionally, users can create exhibits for their own personal use, or they may submit exhibits to be shared with all users. As such, Collex and its relationship to data evolves as users interact with it, relying on folksonomy and user-generated relationships to construct new ways of viewing the information it contains therein. (more…)

Today’s online reading experience is a convergence of search engines, blogs, wikis, forums, social networks, RSS feeds, and traditional web pages (Lieu & Kinzer, 2000). Efforts such as Google Books, Yahoo’s Online Content Alliance, and digital libraries are increasing the rate at which resources such as journal articles, books, periodicals, and informational websites are published online (Carlson & Young, 2004; Gorman & Wilkin, 2005; Hafner, 2005). Correspondingly, an increasing percentage of the U.S. population (73% in 2006) is turning to online resources for work-related research, education. and general information about hobbies, health and shopping (Madden, 2006). Online users now have access to vast amounts of information but may not know how to use it (Azevedo & Cromley, 2004; Rouet, 2006). The risk of information overload, combined with the seductive distractions of online media, challenge users to develop savvy navigation and filtering skills. Faced with over eight billion pages of information (Lyman & Varian, 2003; Markoff, 2005) and unlimited opportunities for interaction, how do online users select what they need and know when to stop?

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Summary:
The Coh-Metrix Project is a research project concerned with predicting the readability of texts in order to facilitate textual comprehension. The underlying assumption of the project is that current “readability” tests, based upon word and sentence length, are inadequate to truly predict textual coherence. Coherence in this context is defined as a mental representation that results from an interaction between the reader’s skills and goals, and textual cohesion. The Coh-Metrix project proposes the creation of two tools that will provide a more nuanced prediction of textual cohesion than current indices allow: 1. Coh-Metrix computes the cohesion of a text based on complex cohesion metrics. 2. CohGIT locates where gaps in textual cohesion occur, facilitating textual improvement. The project relies upon an interdisciplinary approach to reading practices, drawing upon “psychology, linguistics, education, literary theory, cognitive science, mathematics, and artificial intelligence” (McNamara, Louwerse, & Graesser 5). (more…)

Elfenbein, Andrew. “Cognitive Science and the History of Reading.” PMLA 121.2 (2006) 484 – 500.

Summary:
Elfenbein uses the strategies and terms of cognitive approaches to the study of reading to analyze the varied critical response to Robert Browning’s Men and Women, published in 1855. He argues for a critical practice that joins the complexity of literary criticism with the scientific attention to microprocesses of reading. His aim is to reveal that microprocesses, although always individually inflected, are locatable in various cultures and time periods. (more…)

Summary:
TextArc is a program designed to display patterns in textual data in a visually accessible format. The program displays each word in a text twice: once in a spiral that contains all the lines, as they appear, in the text and once in larger font to represent its average position within the text.

TextArc promises to convert large texts into a format that allows users to discern patterns in the text. These patterns, however, are based purely on word frequency and, to that extent, limited in what they can reveal about the text.

The designer of TextArc has been invited to use TextArc in several museum exhibitions, including the online gallery of the Whitney Museum of American Art. (more…)

Summary:
Blogdex is a research project from the MIT Media Laboratory that traces the diffusion of content, represented in the form of hypertext links, over time, through blogs.

Programs such as Blogdex offer a window into the networking structure of the blogging community, an opportunity to systematically analyze large textual datasets, and a way to think about meaning in the online environment. (more…)

Summary:
This report describes the core concepts of XML, as well as how to deploy it and its capabilities. It tries to explain XML from scratch without getting too deep into the details. After an introduction and a first example for a possible XML structure and application, an overview about the components of the mechanisms around XML and their benefits is given. The technical analysis describes what exactly is necessary to work with XML and how. The report contains enough information to get entirely started with XML technology, but as XML is a very broad field, this short essay can not claim any form of completeness, and the interested reader should refer to the given references and various books about XML, XSLT and the other technologies involved. (more…)