“Knowledge Base” here to refers to sites or projects which have employed some kind of innovation or collaborative approach to knowledge-shaping on the Internet.

Online text, multimedia, or social networking resources that allow users to annotate (“tag”) content with metadata (e.g.,category designations) in an open, flexible scheme for sharing with others.

« Back to Objects for Study contents = available research report

(See also Open Tagging Systems, which allow for a minimal level of community formation around shared metadata tags designating common categories of interest.)

« Back to Objects for Study contents = available research report

“The Gallery” exhibits images, Flash animations, audio/video files, Powerpoint files, and other multimedia presentations collected or created by the Transliteracies Project to support of its research. A primary goal of the Gallery is to present crucial ideas or examples in the research areas explored by particular Transliteracies working groups so that they can be quickly grasped by researchers in other working groups with different expertise. For example, the History of Reading working group is currently at work on a visual exhibit of the history of the book. Similarly, the Online Reading & Social Groups working group may produce an exhibit of some of the main variants of social networking.

The Task Sheet allows Transliteracies Project developers to keep track of pending tasks and assignments. It is a temporary register of current activities and schedules in the project.

Besides its project faculty and research assistants, Transliteracies also benefits from contributions from allied scholars. Graduate students in Transliteracies-related courses also contribute to the project Research Clearinghouse.

Technological innovations from the age of manuscripts through modern codex books and document forms.

« Back to Objects for Study contents = available research report

Where appropriate and useful, some art works related to the issues of the Transliteracies Project are also placed in other categories of “Objects for Study.” For example, a work might contribute equally to art and to research in text visualization or data mining. But cross-categorization is the exception rather than rule. Art works that seem intended primarily for an art context or are difficult to generalize are not placed in multiple categories. (Categories would otherwise become less useful, since contemporary art works may have a simultaneously mimetic, parodic, subversive, and/or transformative character that allows them in principle to be placed alongside any and all other objects for study.)

« Back to Objects for Study contents = available research report

See also contemporary Text Encoding (Markup)

« Back to Objects for Study contents = available research report

Contemporary text-encoding and text-markup approaches. (See also Historical Encoding & Formatting Inventions)

« Back to Objects for Study contents = available research report

Collective / group reading practices, both online and historical, distributed and on location (as in a classroom).

« Back to Objects for Study contents = available research report

The following are internal documents intended to facilitate the planning, research activity, and coordination of Transliteracies project faculty and research assistants. These documents are also listed separately in the following categories:

• Work Plans
• Guidelines & FAQs

• Developers Only (Newsletters, etc.)

• Posting FAQ
• Format for “Object for Study”

• Format for Research Reports

Immersive, virtual-reality, or augmented-reality display environments for text, including both large-scale and “book”-scale devices.

« Back to Objects for Study contents = available research report

Search and data mining technology innovations with implications for the future of online reading.

« Back to Objects for Study contents
= available research report

A full definition of online reading—of its range, structure, technologies, practices, innovations, and problem areas—will be the final outcome of the Transliteracies Project. (By 2010, the project will produce “framework of online reading” that blueprints the research development plans, recommendations for best practices, and implementation and evaluation procedures for an integrated range of technological, social, and humanistic approaches to “improving” online reading. (See Project Plan). But along the way to a full definition, Transliteracies will periodically post a brief working definition of its current understanding of the scope of the problem (arrived upon in the course of project research and meetings). This working definition will be revised as needed, and the history of revision may be read as the record of the evolution of the project’s thinking on the topic.

Recent developments in large-scale online text archiving.

« Back to Objects for Study contents = available research report

Included in this category of Objects for Study are foundational programming or coding innovations (as opposed to particular programs) that bear thinking about for their possible impact on online reading practices. (See also Text Encoding (Markup) | Historical Encoding & Formatting Inventions)

« Back to Objects for Study contents = available research report

“Objects for Study is a collection point for innovations (contemporary and historical) of interest to Transliteracies. Definition of “object”: any material, concrete, or discrete entity (e.g., device, program, protocol, article, book, project, art work) that points toward a generalizable paradigm suggesting research trends. Categories: Objects are gathered in one or more categories (e.g., “Hardware Innovations”). Category groups: Categories are stacked (e.g., “1. Hardware”) according to which focus (hardware, software, display, psychology, society, history, etc.) tends to dominate research associated with that topic (fuller explanation).
       See also Bibliography of books and articles related to research into online reading.

Transliteracies creates research reports on selected objects for study.
= available research reports

Currently, participants in the Transliteracies Project include University of California scholars and graduate-student research assistants. In the future, the group may also include researchers from other universities or affiliate with research programs elsewhere.

Research into the nature, varieties, and social forms of literacy, past or present, print- or media-based.

« Back to Objects for Study contents = available research report

Included in this category of Objects for Study are hardware inventions or devices that bear thinking about for their possible impact on online reading practices. Also included for historical perspective are some hardware innovations of past media revolutions (e.g., vellum, the codex book).

« Back to Objects for Study contents = available research report

Interesting objects bearing on digital reading interfaces, especially where text is adapting (and vice versa) to networked and multimedia communication environments. Included are innovations in such fields as human factors inferface research (HFI), text-encoding, text visualization and art, etc.

« Back to Objects for Study contents
= available research report