The Orlando Project

University of Alberta and University of Guelph

Background: The history of reading, writing, and the dissemination of technology is one of epochal change, and each transition – indeed the history of the book – is marked by hybridity. In the mature years of print, publishers, librarians, and scholars had clearly defined and segregated roles. In the digital realm, the boundaries have broken down....

Linked open data provides a means of producing an interlinked and more navigable scholarly environment to permit: the better integration of research materials; the potential to address the specificities of the nomenclature, discourses, and methodologies; and the ability to respect institutional and individual investments. The paper proposes a linke...

Writing and editing interfaces have profound implications for the subjectivity of human writers and editors, and hence the conditions of digital scholarly knowledge production. The extent to which the cultural inflections of such interfaces reflect the social, political, and technical contexts of their production emerges from a consideration of Aut...

Theorists of technology adoption have demonstrated that successful technologies rely on social resources. This article takes up social tensions involved in designing digital resources for scholarship, at the centre of which stand editing tools. These are (1) individualism versus collaboration in relation to credit; (2) the shift towards dynamism ve...

The non-linear and iterative nature of scholarly research processes presents complexities with respect to how online collaborative systems manage versions both within interfaces and at the back end. This article maps out a two-part framework for thinking about versions and versioning in the context of contemporary scholarship and data preservation....

Academic prototyping, like ethnography or bench studies, is a way of producing new knowledge about an idea. It can result in a kind of evidence that can be used to strengthen or weaken an argument. A prototype is an artifact, but it is not just an artifact; it may be a phase in product development, but it is not necessarily so. It is also, and perh...

Why is big data such a big deal? Modern digital communications are producing and recording data at a feverish rate, with 90% of the world’s recorded data, most of it unstructured, having been produced in just the last two years (Dragland, 2013). In addition, more traditional texts are being digitized all the time, and Crane (2006) tells us that whi...

Franco Moretti rightly claims that what we are reading when we use text mining methods and visualizations are really models of the collections (Moretti, 2013, p. 157). It is important therefore to survey the visual models emerging from Digital Humanities research and question if they can better be designed to suit humanities exploration. In this pa...

The non-linear and iterative nature of scholarly research processes presents complexities with respect to how online collaborative systems manage versions both within interfaces and at the back end. This article maps out a two-part framework for thinking about versions and versioning in the context of contemporary scholarship and data preservation....

This paper uses the case of author Michael Field, the shared writing identity of two late Victorian women, to consider the implications of embracing the semantic web for humanities research. It is argued that the ontologies prevalent today reveal a lack of nuance when it comes to the complex relationships that are the focus of much humanities resea...

It is sometimes said that the academy today is undergoing rapid change, and that one of the changes we have been experiencing is in the rate of dissemination of research results. Our previous generation could comfortably spend 10 years on a project, and produce a monograph at the end, confident that they were meeting the expectations of everyone in...

In this article, we provide a discussion of the concept of visual interactive workflows, how they relate to our previous work on structured surfaces, and how they have been adapted to experiments in managing articles for journal publication and managing biographical histories being written and tagged in XML. We conclude with a user experience study...

In this article, we provide a discussion of the concept of visual interactive workflows, how they relate to our previous work on structured surfaces, and how they have been adapted to experiments in managing articles for journal publication and managing biographical histories being written and tagged in XML. We conclude with a user experience study...

This short paper offers a case study in the challenges associated with the translation of content from a particularly rich set of XML tags in a boutique digital humanities project–The Orlando Project–into RDF.

A Short History and Demonstration of the Dynamic Table of Contexts

Metaphors are a widely used resource for interface design and analysis. Based on Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal work on metaphor, Barr (2002) developed a model that acknowledges three types of metaphors commonly used by designers to give individuals who interact with an interface a sense of its logic from first sight, and to scaffold their understand...

Orlando Workflow is a prototypical browsing interface designed for the Orlando Project, an electronic text base on women’s writing in the British Isles, to enable tracking of the writing and XML encoding–by multiple team members–of interpretive documents (see Figure 2). The user study with Orlando Workflow is the second phase of a two-phase study o...

Recent experiments in developing scalable, open-source publishing and research support software for the humanities have begun to realize some of the opportunities of the ongoing digital revolution. As Project 5 of the International Association for Visual Culture (IAVC) remarks, recent developments in online publishing present “opportunities and cha...

This article discusses a set of prototypes currently being designed and created by the Interface Design team of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project. These prototypes attempt to supplement the user experience in reading digital scholarly editions, by supporting a set of tasks that are straightforward in a digital environment b...

In this panel, we report on our year 4 work in the Interface Design (ID) research team of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project. INKE is a 7-year major collaborative research initiative (MCRI) project funded in Canada by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). INKE is led by Ray Siemens at the University of...

This chapter considers how digital technologies have opened up new methods for the creation, dissemination, and critical reception of literary and cultural histories. It provides an overview of the collaboratively created digital textbase Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present and how such technologies enab...

Scholars usually have to deal with many different type of documents spread in vary stages, especially in the case of big projects. Piles and piles of documents scattered in many folders waiting for tagging, revision, approval or whatever it is that needs to be completed. There are workflow management tools available to help us, but they often are t...

This article addresses the design of a dynamic repository interface to support numerous scholarly activities. Starting with the four fundamental functions associated with persistent storage — create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) — we tested, as an organizing rubric for the interface, the acronym CREAM: Create (represent, illustrate); Read (sampl...

Starting with the four fundamental functions associated with persistent storage — create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) — we tested, as an organizing rubric for the interface, the acronym CREAM: Create (represent, illustrate); Read (sample, read); Enhance (refer, annotate, process); Analyze (search, select, visualize, mine, cluster); and Manage (...

Of social scholarship—admittedly a more specific concept than that of social networking—I would like to say what Mahatma Gandhi allegedly replied when asked what he thought about Western civilization: I think it would be a good idea. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter facilitate modes of digital sociality that, for all the press they...

Many projects in the digital humanities involve either digitization or enrichment of existing digital materials. In both these cases, the process can be understood as a workflow. Similarly, in a editorial project, the raw text has to be entered, then it has to be encoded, proofed and tested in a publication environment. Once again, there is a proce...

This paper describes the preliminary results of combining two complementary technologies: Orlando, a semantically-tagged XML collection of born-digital scholarly resources, and the Mandala Browser, an XML visualization tool. Orlando's current delivery system privileges text as an approach to literary historical scholarship. The Mandala browser repr...

This paper describes the preliminary results of combining two complementary technologies: Orlando, a semantically-tagged XML collection of born-digital scholarly resources, and the Mandala Browser, an XML visualization tool. Orlando's current delivery system privileges text as an approach to literary historical scholarship. The Mandala browser repr...

This paper explores ways of visually presenting large, complex sets of interlinkages discerned through the textbase markup of Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present. Visual means enable detailed connections to bring out broader, general patterning, explored here through two prototype web interfaces along wi...

This paper explores ways of visually presenting large, complex sets of interlinkages discerned through the textbase markup of Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present. Visual means enable detailed connections to bring out broader, general patterning, explored here through two prototype web interfaces along wi...

The case of the Orlando Project offers a useful interrogation of concepts like completion and finality, as they emerge in the arena of electronic publication. The idea of "doneness" circulates discursively within a complex and evolving scholarly ecology where new modes of digital publication are changing our conceptions of textuality, at the same t...

The foremother of Orlando was The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, published in 1990 by Batsford Academic in the U.K. and by Yale University Press in the U.S., edited by Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy. This early reference book on women's worldwide writing in English contained 2700 author entries and a few topic en...

Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present was published by subscription on the web by Cambridge University Press in June 2006. Information about the textbase, about subscribing as an institution or individual, and about the trial period or preview available for either is accessible at: http://www.cambridge.org...

A feminist web-based research initiative must make electronic publication an integral part of the research design. We are at a critical juncture in the production of scholarly tools in electronic form, as we move from the production of archives that seek to reproduce existing collections of primary material towards more mediated contextual material...

This paper explores theoretical and practical aspects of intertextuality, in relation to the highly interpretive "intertextuality" tag within the SGML tagset developed by the Orlando Project for its history of women's writing in the British Isles. Arguing that the concept of intertextuality is both crucial to and poses particular challenges to the...

This paper describes the novel ways in which the Orlando Project, based at the Universities of Alberta and Guelph, is using SGML to create an integrated electronic history of British women's writing in English. Unlike most other SGML-based humanities computing projects which are tagging existing texts, we are researching and writing new material, i...

This paper reflects on the interplay between DTD design and that of the delivery system of the Orlando Project, an intensively encoded body of born digital materials in women's literary history. The project developed and refined an extensive content-oriented SGML tagset before any mate - rial had been written, and without specific delivery plans. F...

Thesis (M.A.)--Dalhousie University, 1987. Includes bibliography.

Includes abstract. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Alberta, 1991. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 249-273). Photocopy. s