Rosalie Lack
SIMS 290-A Electronic Publishing
October 5, 1998Comparative Analysis for "Suffragists Speak"
I looked at a variety of articles; some raised new issues and some confirmed for me that we were already on the right track. I was primarily looking for articles that discussed issues related to electronic publishing of scholarly materials. I will briefly describe the articles that I found to be the most interesting and discuss the way in which they relate to our publishing project.
- Joan K. Lippincott, "Challenges of the Digital Library," Educom Review Volume 32, Number 3, May/June 1997
http://www.educom.edu/wweb/pubs/reviewArticles/32356.htmlAlthough for our electronic publishing project we are clearly not creating a digital library, I found this article nonetheless helpful. This short article contained some good, practical advice to anyone embarking on an electronic publishing project. The article contained a list of six characteristics that, according to the author, a digital library should possess in order to be useful. All six are issues that we should keep in mind when designing our site. The characteristics are Coherence, Economic Infrastructure, Searchability, Presentation, Service and Opportunity. Coherence refers to the fact that the digital library should have an organizing principle that sorts the material by topic or type of material. Secondly, it is important to consider the Economic Infrastructure that is necessary to make a project viable. There are many models that one could follow such as licensing agreements or subscriber fees. Searchability is just that, the ability to be able to efficiently and effectively search the content on a site. Lippincott points out that the effectiveness of a search tool is linked to the completeness of the metadata. Service is the guidance that is provided to the user to help them navigate the site. Some suggested solutions were to include ways for the user to ask questions, to use frames for orienting the user and developing FAQs. The final characteristic is Opportunity. It is recognizing the opportunity that the site provides for serving a variety of users that can benefit from the information on the site.
- Bill Kasdorf. "SGML and PDF-Why we Need Both," The Journal of Electronic Publishing, Volume 3, Issue 4, June 1998.
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/03-04/kasdorf.htmlThis article discusses the strength and weaknesses of SGML and PDF formats. Kasdorf concludes that it is not a matter of deciding between the two but rather being aware that they serve different purposes. Reading about SGML confirmed for me that SGML markup of our texts is the correct way to do it. As pointed out by Kasdorf, SGML is an effective tool for describing the meaning of a document. In addition, since it is platform independent, it allows for easy interchange of documents. He did of course point out its negative aspects; included among them is that SGML requires a DTD and it is a complicated and time-consuming process to write one (of course as we used TEI, we did not need to come up with the DTD). With regards to PDF, I chose this article because I had not considered the usefulness of PDF for our project. Clearly in the publishing world it is the best way to deliver typeset pages. For our project, it might be a format that we offer to users who want to print out multiple pages of the transcripts.
- Willis G. Regier. "Scholarly Press Websites," The Journal of Electronic Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 1. September, 1998.
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-01/regier.htmlThis article consists of a summary of an informal survey of 125 scholarly press Websites. Regier discusses certain features that the various sites do and don't possess. There are two particularly useful sections of the article. The first is his recommendation of sites that exhibit "maximum elegance" or "maximized content" or are examples of good design. In addition, at the end of the article he provides a checklist of features that are, in his opinion, essential elements of good sites. Some of them are more narrowly applicable to Scholarly press than to our project, however most are good advice that we should definitely keep in mind when designing our interface. For example, one of them was that users prefer to click rather than scroll. Also as he states, the "user should never be more than a click away from the home page". Another very practical issue is that a "back" button should take the user back a page not back to the home page. Also he stressed the importance of having a search engine on the site. A final point that I found interesting was that he recommends that a site should be "generous with links and links to links", in his opinion link-rich sites are most likely to be kept as bookmarks.
- John LaVagnino. "Reading, Scholarship, and Hypertext Editions," The Journal of Electronic Publishing. Volume 3, Issue 1. September 1997.
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/03-01/reading.htmlIn this article, one of the main issues raised was that it is not sufficient to simply put text online; it is equally as important to supply the user with tools so that they can exploit fully the interactive nature of hypertext. This idea coincides with what our group hopes to accomplish in the "Suffragists Speak" project. Currently all we have is the raw text online. We hope to be able to provide some tools so that the user can understand the content and come away with a good understanding of the history of the time period and the contribution made by these women.
Another interesting point that LaVagnino makes is that in his opinion hypertext is more effective for study, rather than for reading. He defines reading as a "performance" during which the reader does not want to be interrupted, (like being interrupted by hypertext links). In contrast when one studies or interprets text, the user is looking for relationships between words and different versions of text so hyperlinks are an effective tool in that context. LaVagnino even brings in Vannevar Bush, saying that Bush intended hypertext to be used as a "mechanical aid to scholarly labor, not to ordinary reading; the associative motion of the link, rather than the straightforward linear motion of conventional reading, is how scholars work."