Scholarly editor Gary Taylor has asked: \u201cHow can you love a work, if you don\u2019t know it? How can you know it, if you can\u2019t get near it? How can you get near it, without editors?\u201d Scholarly editors and other textual scholars are an integral part of the continuum that keeps the stories of the past understood by the present\u2014but just as important is the you<\/i>, that public of not just scholars, but also readers beyond the academy whose interest keeps the humanities alive and relevant.<\/p>\n
As a web developer and textual scholar, I’m interested in improving interfaces to digital humanities projects: can we design for a more public conversation? MITH is supporting my\u00a0dissertational Infinite <\/i>Ulysses<\/a> project, for which I’ve built a participatory digital edition of James Joyce’s difficult but rewarding novel Ulysses. <\/i>The website creates a community for discussing the text; users can highlight sections of the text to add a comment, question, or interpretation, as well as read, upvote, and tag others’ annotations. A variety of sorting, filtering, and toggling options customize the experience to an individual reader’s needs, whether that reader knows Church Latin, wants to avoid spoilers, needs extra help as a first-time reader, or is a scholar studying Ulysses<\/i>‘ puzzles or the function\u00a0of written material (letters, poems, etc.) throughout the novel.<\/p>\n Besides this design and coding work, I’ll conduct user testing to gauge the\u00a0use, usefulness, and usability<\/a> of the edition. Digital editions are a key humanities scholarly form, but often we don’t base our understanding of how they are read and used on data gathered through formal user testing. This project builds on my master’s thesis work<\/a> at the University of Michigan School of Information, where I explored user testing for the digital humanities, and how digital archives and editions might be designed to include a public audience.<\/p>\n I’ll assess the digital edition site itself, looking at how features drawn from existing, successful online communities that deal with quantity and quality of text (such as Reddit and StackExchange) port to digital humanities platforms. I’ll also use test and analytics data to support the speculative design of the edition as an “infinite”\u00a0Ulysses<\/em> conversation. Could the site still produce customized reading experiences while storing\u00a0an “infinite” quantity of annotations of various quality? What happens to complex texts\u2014especially those authored to be hypertextual, chaotic, and encyclopedic, like Ulysses<\/i>\u2014when a participatory digital edition places them under “infinite” annotations and conversations? Data on reading behavior\u2014such as what pages of the book take users the longest to read, or receive the most annotations, or the most contentious (both up- and down-voted) annotations\u2014will give me a basis to speculate on questions like these.<\/p>\n I’m finishing up private alpha-testing of the site this month. Beta-testing with individual volunteers will begin at the start of January, with group testing (teachers\/students, book clubs) following at the end of the month.\u00a0To sign up as an Infinite Ulysses beta-tester, share your Ulysses annotations, or inquire about using Infinite Ulysses in your classroom or book club this January, please fill out this form<\/a>!<\/p>\n I’m grateful to MITH for their support\u2014I’m working this academic year as MITH’s Winnemore Digital Dissertation Fellow, allowing me to focus full-time on the project’s various deliverables. The dissertation takes a unique non-monograph form, consisting of the Infinite<\/em> Ulysses participatory digital edition (plus a public code repository and documentation on using my code to create your own participatory digital edition); user testing, site analytics, and analysis; and regular research blogging culminating in a scholarly article final draft. For more about the project, check out the quick three-minute video below,\u00a0read more on\u00a0the project<\/a>\u00a0page, or get the latest by following my regular research blogging<\/a>.<\/p>\n