Transliteracies Project R esearch in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading A University of California Multi-campus Research Group (MRG) 28 faculty & 16 graduate students from 7 UC campuses Seed grant ($350,000 from UC Office of the President and UCSB) Principal Investigator: Alan Liu transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu

Project Agenda: Study and improve online reading Research Perspectives: Technological (hardware, HCI, networking) Social (e.g., social networking and IT) Humanistic (e.g., history of reading) Artistic (e.g., text visualization projects) Psychological (e.g., cognitive science) Goal: Define a unified framework for research and development to improve online reading

Project Agenda: Deliverables during seed grant White paper defining a framework for research, development, and assessment of online reading (“UC Framework for Online Reading”) Speculative tools for online reading Fictional scenarios of online reading Case studies and assessments

UCSB Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading, June 2005

Progress to Date: Research Clearinghouse

Progress to Date: Working Groups History of Reading (leader: William Warner): New Reading Interfaces (leader: Rita Raley) Social Dynamics and Online Meaning (leader: John Mohr)

Progress to Date: Conceptualization of End Goal What will the “UC Framework for Online Reading” look like?

Conceptualization of End Goal: Recent Catalysts for Thought Interface for project Research Clearinghouse

Conceptualization of End Goal: Recent Catalysts for Thought Text-encoding (“markup”) approaches Document level e.g., Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Collection levels e.g., Metadata & Transmission Standard (METS) The SICK ROSE O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.

Conceptualization of End Goal: Recent Catalysts for Thought Rama Hoetzlein (UCSB MAT Program) M.A. thesis for UCSB Media Arts & Technology program on “The Organization of Human Knowledge” (in progress) Paper on “A Language-Based Ontology for Interdisciplinary Research” (2006) Quanta Project (in progress) Andrew Elfenbein (U. Minnesota) "Cognitive Science and the History of Reading." PMLA (2006) "What Humanists Need to Know about the Scientific Study of Reading" (paper, NASSR 2006) Jennifer Earl, Clayton Childress, John Mohr, Katrina Kimport (UCSB Sociology Dept.)

Conceptualization of End Goal: Hypothesis We don’t yet know the specifics, but we may already know the form that the UC Framework for Online Reading must take. The Framework must envision a way to describe what is “interesting” socially, historically, physically, visually (or otherwise) in both the internal structure and networked relations of online texts so as to expose those interest factors to machine processing, thus allowing for a variety of interesting outputs and interfaces.

Take any online text-intensive artifact, whether "print-like" or "Web 2.0-like"—e.g., a newspaper article; a Wikipedia article; a blog page, a MySpace.com page). What is interesting about the artifact in its internal structure/behavior and external relations? Each of the project research groups will have a different approach to that question. Examples of possible interest factors (explicit and implicit): Topics, evidence, authority Links to other online topics, evidence, authorities, usage, users Usages, users, social viewpoint Conceptualization of End Goal: Foundational Question 1

Conceptualization of End Goal: Foundational Question 2 How can we describe (“mark up,” “encode”) what is interesting so that a machine can see it and do something with it? Analogy between early manuscripts and online text today

Conceptualization of End Goal: Foundational Question 2: Illustration: Historical Mark-Up Approaches Argument (grammar, rhetoric, logic) Technical & Interface innovations—e.g., word spacing punctuation paragraphing rubrication indexing etc. Formal and Media innovations—e.g., genre design/layout illustrations and diagrams

Conceptualization of End Goal: Foundational Question 2: Illustration: Formal Ontology & Markup Approaches Rama Hoetzlein’s Quanta system

Conceptualization of End Goal: Foundational Question 3 How can we process ("data mine," "text mine") the interest factors so as to optimize: a user's or social group's expected result and productively unexpected results?

Conceptualization of End Goal: Foundational Question 3: Illustration: Statistical Text Analysis John W. Mohr and Vincent Duquenne "The Duality of Culture and Practice: Poverty Relief in New York City, "

Hypothesis: Foundational Question 4 How can we output / display / interface with what is interesting in online text?

Hypothesis: Foundational Question 4: Illustration: Text Visualization “Interesting” frontend interfaces Bradford Paley’s Textarc, Warren Sack’s, Agnostics, Rama Hoetzlein’s Quanta

Framework for Improving Online Reading

Hypothesis: An Online Literacy Approach A “grammar” for analyzing and encoding entities and relations of interest: Statement (Object-Attribute-Value), or Statement (Resources, Properties) Example: “John Milton is the author of Paradise Lost”

Hypothesis: An Online Literacy Approach Formalized logically as “semantic networks” and “hypergraphs” (cf., “social networking” theory)

Hypothesis: An Online Literacy Approach Formalized technically in encoding standards: Formal ontology standards (e.g., OWL) Markup standards (e.g., TEI, METS, SMIL, MANS, RDF) Encoding standards (e.g. XML)

Hypothesis: An Online Literacy Approach Natalya F. Noy and Deborah L. McGuinness Ontology Example

Hypothesis: An Online Literacy Approach Processed (at the backend) and Presented (at the interface) in “interesting” ways for analysis for correlation for retention for annotation for pleasure

Hypothesis: An Online Literacy Approach Goal: a unified, extensible framework for “improving” online reading Humans decide what is “interesting” in the input (including thematic, formal, historical, sociological, economic, and other interests). Machines amplify the ability to discover and process the interesting. Humans decide what is “interesting” as an output. Machines amplify the ability to process and present in an interesting way

Transliteracies Project R esearch in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading Principal Investigator: Alan Liu transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu