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Usability, technology, and community

At the outset, determining the potential for integrating an individual project with other collections and projects at the global level will ensure a project’s longevity, but my first concern before developing this strategy has been attending to decisions about software, programming, and markup. TEI is the gold standard for scholarly digital texts, but these encoded documents are mysteries to most of their users, and still end up being transformed into HTML and CSS for display in a web browser. Perhaps for this reason, scholarly projects for the most part can only dream of the tremendous volunteer participation by the free culture community all over the world in projects such as Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, or Creative Commons. Here again, I turn to accessibility and usability: the first collection of free electronic books, Project Gutenberg, founded by Michael Hart in 1971, are distributed in “Plain Vanilla ASCII,” HTML, and a few other experimental open frameworks. They are still both accessible and readable on any operating system today, and augmented by other popular and usable formats such as HTML. Most important, especially in terms of ASCII and HTML, they are easy to make. The first web page, written and published by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, is still both accessible and readable on any browser on any of the major operating systems today, (External Link) . Though CERN no longer supports the original site, The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has archived what seems to be the least recently modified web page, last changed Tue, 13 Nov 1990 15:17:00 GMT. (External Link) . and could be easily written by anyone today in a text editor or a more advanced WYSIWYG HTML editor, readily available in a multitude of free and commercial versions. Scholarly works focusing on the more rigorous process of markup in SGML have occasionally fared less well. For example, the proprietary e-book software DynaText is now out of business, and books in this format cannot be read on recent Macs unless they happen to be running Windows. I am not saying anything new or remarkable here, but digital editions and projects published in any format that is not open source (modifiable by current and subsequent developers of the editions, and unencumbered by DRM locks), or at least readily accessible and compatible with the majority of browsers or e-book readers online today, will not be sustainable unless the developers have the means to continuously update and rewrite the edition. According to Google, “PDF formatted files are the most popular after HTML files,” (External Link) . clearly suggesting that usability and availability of both production and reading tools will encourage the creation and use of digital documents. Publication of digital editions and text that are not open access will also limit their use and their contributions to public knowledge.

Another major difficulty, then, for digital projects is establishing long-term access, ease of use, ease of contributions, and long-term compatibility of the interface with web browsers. Should I gamble on any scripting language or display that is not the most ubiquitous of current web technologies? Will I need to reconsider how my maps, jpg tiles displayed via Adobe’s proprietary Flash technology, are accessed ten years from now, should Flash be superseded by more elegant software that will work on all e-book readers? (Imagine a scholar in the past having to decide, in addition to producing an intellectually challenging and original work, what is most likely to be the most sustainable medium for publication: who ever had to wonder, Will my book open in an old house? Will it open in ten years if its owner moves to a new house? Will it open faster if I change the book’s binding in five years?) While my interface, in HTML and delivered from a MYSQL server, and my data, output from the server as XML files, are assured to be readable for many years, the “Zoomified” (External Link) . maps that I have created as one access point to the digital edition of London will need to be constantly monitored and tested as Flash develops over time.

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Source:  OpenStax, Online humanities scholarship: the shape of things to come. OpenStax CNX. May 08, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11199/1.1
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