0.26 Underpinnings of the social edition

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Underpinnings of the social edition? a narrative, 2004-9, for the renaissance english knowledgebase (rekn) and professional reading environment (pree) projects

Ray Siemens, Mike Elkink, Alastair McColl, Karin Armstrong, James Dixon, Angelsea Saby, Brett D. Hirsch and Cara Leitch, with Martin Holmes, Eric Haswell, Chris Gaudet, Paul Girn, Michael Joyce, Rachel Gold, and Gerry Watson, and members of the PKP, Iter, TAPoR, and INKE teams.

Abstract

The Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn) is an electronic knowledgebase consisting of primary and secondary materials (text, image, and audio) related to the Renaissance period. The limitations of existing tools to accurately search, navigate, and read large collections of data in many formats, coupled with the findings of our research into professional reading, led to the development of a Professional Reading Environment (PReE) to meet these needs. Both were conceived as necessary components of a prototype textual environment for an electronic scholarly edition of the Devonshire Manuscript. This article offers an overview of the development of both REKn and PReE at the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory (ETCL) at the University of Victoria, from proof of concept through to their current iteration, concluding with a discussion about their future adaptation, implementation, and integration with other projects and partnerships.

1. introduction and overview

The Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn) is a prototype research knowledgebase consisting of a large dynamic corpus of both primary (15,000 text, image, and audio objects) and secondary materials (some 100,000 articles, e-books, etc.) Each electronic document is stored in a database along with its associated metadata and, in the case of many text-based materials, a light XML encoding. The data is queried, analyzed and examined through a stand-alone prototype document-centered reading client called the Professional Reading Environment (PReE), written for initial prototyping in .NET and, in a more recent implementation, with key parts modeled in Ruby on Rails.

Recently, both projects have moved into new research developmental contexts, requiring some dramatic changes in direction from our earlier proof of concept. For the second iteration of PReE, our primary goal continues to be to translate it from a desktop environment to the Internet. By following a web-application paradigm, we are able to take advantage of superior flexibility in application deployment and maintenance, the ability to receive and disseminate user-generated content, and multi-platform compatibility. As for REKn, experimentation with the prototype has seen the binary and textual data transferred from the database into the file system, affording gains in manageability and scalability and the ability to deploy third-party index and search tools.

As initial proof-of-concepts, REKn and PReE evoked James Joyce’s apt comment that “a man of genius makes no mistakes”; rather, that “his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery” (1986: 9.228-29). In our case, we set out to develop a “project of genius” and found that our errors (volitional or, as was more often the case, accidental) certainly provided the necessary direction to pursue a more usable and useful reading environment for professional readers. On the importance of imperfection and failure, especially as it pertains to a digital humanities audience, see Unsworth 1997.