OPEN PUBLISHING WITH SCALAR SIDLIT of C2CJuly 2015

PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION

Scalar, a free and open-source multimedia-rich publishing platform, was created to encourage building born-digital contents and bringing together scholars to apply their analytical expertise to online repositories. Scalar is designed to be a critical part of the Semantic Web (Web 3.0 as conceptualized by Tim Berners-Lee) to enable both machine- and human- interactions with the presented data. This presentation will include a general introduction to Scalar and a walk-through about how to create an account and start a publication. This will introduce Scalar paths, styles, organizing structures, navigable and interactive data visualizations, built-in tagging, and other features. Multiple completed publications will be displayed. Scalar is supported by The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (ANVC) and hosted by the University of Southern California. (Note: Scalar is used as the platform underlying Colleague 2 Colleague’s “C2C Digital Magazine.”)

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OVERVIEW

Open publishing

Semantic Web for browsing robots Human- and machine-access

ANVC and a brief history

Scalar and its affordances Integrations with Web-based digital archives

and repositories Multimedia showcasing Open-source, self-hosted or ANVC-hosted The Semantic Web

Experiential and interactive Built-in data visualizations Virtual community Protected data and content archival Evolving system and evolving publications

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OVERVIEW (CONT.)

Live demos (audience-driven) Account creation Sequence of open publishing with Scalar

Additional resources Main site On Twitter Scalar User’s Guide

Wish list

Contact and conclusion

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OPEN PUBLISHING

Open-access: “unrestricted online access to peer-reviewed scholarly research” Gratis (free online access) Libre (free online access and additional rights, such as those released through Creative Commons

licensure)

May involve commercial and non-commercial publishers May involve processing payment by authors May involve publications with credibility issues and “predatory” practices May involve publicly hosted sites (with varying degrees of peer review and editorial oversight)

Open-access does not necessarily mean wider readership than work in renowned journals (reader attention all depends on reputation, credibility, informational value, contents, author charisma, and style)

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SEMANTIC WEB…FOR “BROWSING ROBOTS”

"The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help. One of the major obstacles to this has been the fact that most information on the Web is designed for human consumption, and even if it was derived from a database with well defined meanings (in at least some terms) for its columns, that the structure of the data is not evident to a robot browsing the Web. Leaving aside the artificial intelligence problem of training machines to behave like people, the Semantic Web approach instead develops languages for expressing information in a machine process-able form.“

--Tim Berners-Lee, The Semantic Web Roadmap (1998)

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STRUCTURING AND LABELING INFORMATION FOR THE SEMANTIC WEBUnstructured (all-else besides data in databases) vs. structured (labeled and schematized, in a dataset) information; semi-structured data Semantic metadata Folk tagging (not structured metadata standards)

Machine searchable, machine findable, machine collectable, machine capturable, and delivery of data for various ends

Some apparent implications: Atomization of information, (dis)aggregation of data, data repackaging, variant data sequencing, and

intended and unintended meanings of original content

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THE ALLIANCE FOR NETWORKING VISUAL CULTURE (ANVC) AND A BRIEF HISTORYSome selective history: Created in 2011 to support “emerging genres

of scholarship” through media-rich digital publication and digital preservation First ANVC project Feb. 7, 2011, as Tweeted

out by Lead PI Tara McPherson (@tmcphers)

Online presences: @anvcscalar with the landing page at

https://twitter.com/anvcscalar A word cloud of the @anvcscalar Tweetstream

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WORD CLOUD OF THE @ANVCSCALARTWEETSTREAM

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SCALAR AND ITS AFFORDANCES: INTEGRATIONS WITH WEB-BASED DIGITAL ARCHIVES AND REPOSITORIESOne main objective: To bring together experts to create value by interacting with and analyzing contents on online archives A product of the time A respect for the digital contents being mass created by people

Funding: Vectors, IML, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities Partnerships with University Presses: Michigan, MIT, California, NYU, Duke, Open Humanities Press (OHP) Also ties with university libraries and humanities centers

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SCALAR AND ITS AFFORDANCES: INTEGRATIONS WITH WEB-BASED DIGITAL ARCHIVES AND REPOSITORIES (CONT.)

Integrations with online archives: Critical Commons, Cuban Theater Digital Archive, Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library, Hypercities, Internet Archive, PLAY!, Shoah Foundation, VHA Online, Shoah Foundation VHA (partner site), and others Other archives: Getty Museum Collection, Prezi, SoundCloud, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vimeo, and YouTube Integration: Internet and Surface Web Enables the building of a light textual, digital visualization, and interactive overlay over imagery,

video, and other contents hosted elsewhere (in content-sharing sites) Does not support image-heavy uploads but only one-image-at-a-time uploads Does not enable any direct web hosting of own videos Is vulnerable to removal of digital contents from linked online repositories

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SCALAR AND ITS AFFORDANCES: MULTIMEDIA SHOWCASINGTypes of multimedia (lim: 2 MB per object):

Imagery: .gif, .jpg, .png, .tif

Style: css, html

Video: .m4v, .mp4, .wav, .flv, .mov,

Audio: .mp3

Document: html, xml, kml

(and 3gp, aif, mpg, oga, webm)

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SCALAR AND ITS AFFORDANCES: OPEN-SOURCE, SELF-HOSTED OR ANVC-HOSTED

Open-source and self-hosted (GitHub) Free ANVC-hosted approach Multimedia rich approach Pre-skinned style (theme) options (and

customization options using CSS and Javascript) May integrate Google Analytics for data

collection from the site Microsite for presentations

Exportable as an RDF-JSON file with all pages and relationships defined Open API: custom interface, visualization, database, and mash-up

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SCALAR AND ITS AFFORDANCES: THE SEMANTIC WEB •Semantic Web-friendly (with built-in semantic metadata-ing in the publication production process)

•Supportive of born-digital contents

•No hierarchy of information—everything is a “page” • A thing (page) is defined by…its contents, its

metadata (tags, descriptors), its relationships (which define context)

•Application of meta-data and tags to the various “pages”

•Accessibility enablements (for example, alt-texting, inter-relational text / media)

•Content-type awareness

•May create a publisher identity and logo for a collection of publications

•Page versioning and revertibility to a prior version

•Dependency manager for link preservation even with file name changes (persistent identifiers)

Unicode sets and multi-lingual coding

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SCALAR AND ITS AFFORDANCES: EXPERIENTIAL AND INTERACTIVE Experiential paths, selective branching, various points-of-entry, sequentiality, and non-sequentiality (spatial networked exploration, non-linearities) Interactive and visual navigational structures (built into Scalar) Left menu bar navigation

Path navigation

Image map navigation (types of image visualizations and design impetuses)

Radial: Use a rich variety of content types and interrelationships.

Index: Use a variety of relations between Scalar publication elements

Paths: Use complex paths

Media: Use a variety of media

Tag: Tag page with image map visualization heavily (with all tags used in the project

Multimedia integrations

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SCALAR AND ITS AFFORDANCES: BUILT-IN DATA VISUALIZATIONSBuilt-in and interactive data visualizations Radial or chord diagram Grid structures Node-link structures

Varies between issue-level and page-level (in terms of underlying data representation)

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SCALAR AND ITS AFFORDANCES: VIRTUAL COMMUNITY Co-authorship and team authorship option Digital sharing of the book and its structure: public URL, Scalar indexing, reviewability, notifications of new comments, Hypothes.is sidebar for collaborative and folk “open annotation,” joinability, and duplicability Publishing Public publishing option (reversible)

Private publishing option (reversible)

Commenting (interactivity) option Benefits of signing up for notifications of commenting (to provide a timely response)

Are robots and human spammers who will try to hang messages on a book that have nothing to do with the book’s contents

Scalar Support Forum Scalar Showcase of notable projects

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SCALAR AND ITS AFFORDANCES: PROTECTED DATA AND CONTENT ARCHIVAL •Requires ANVC server admin access to delete a book if the (non-local, cloud-based) Scalar hosted solution is used

•Enables powerful digital content archival • Offers a digital platform to support live presentations • Works well for post-event content sharing

• Supports the “after lives” of projects

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SCALAR AND ITS AFFORDANCES: EVOLVING SYSTEM AND EVOLVING PUBLICATIONS•Continual updates and improvements to Scalar

• Changing theme options (and across-issue updates) • New interactive visualizations

•Encouragement to create living documents, publications, and collections, that are constantly evolving • No print version straight-to-PDF to encourage evolutionary nature of the project (because of the risk of

“lock in” • May publish particular pages (if PDF-printing or PDF-saving extension in the Web browser)

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LIVE DEMOSAccount creation Sequence of open publishing with Scalar (and audience driven)

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ACCOUNT CREATION

Email verified account May be shared (by sharing the email identifier and the password on Scalar)

May invite others to co-write / co-edit / co-review / collaborate around a publication or sequence of publications Co-developers may be invited to be “Book users” (on a project-by-project basis) through the

Dashboard Co-developers have to have created and registered their own accounts on Scalar first… No current role-based levels of access (so either all or nothing access, no ability to use “least

privilege”)

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SEQUENCE OF OPEN PUBLISHING WITH SCALAR

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SEQUENCE OF OPEN PUBLISHING…

1. Conceptualization and planning

2. Stylebook (formal or informal)

3. Starting publication in Scalar

4. Content creation and artwork

5. Labeling and tagging of contents

6. Tapping online repositories

7. Content accessibility

8. Copyright releases

9. Peer review and revision

10. TOC, paths, branches (structure)

11. Application of style

12. Sharing rights

13. Soft launch / hard launch / publicity

14. Community interaction and collaboration

15. Computer interaction with and around contents

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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Main Alliance for Networking Visual Culture site

@anvcscalar on Twitter

Scalar User’s Guide

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WISH LIST

An indexing method of contents (such as to Google Scholar)

A visually integrated and navigable way to create serialization between various projects / publications / issues

Geotagging features

An easy way to create an online streamgraph to show complex time relationships

Better handling of image aspect ratio (particularly those which are long and thin images)

Crowd-sourcing elicitation features (beyond commenting)

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CONTACT AND CONCLUSION

Dr. Shalin Hai-Jew Instructional Designer, iTAC, Kansas State University 212 Hale / Farrell Library 1117 Mid-Campus Drive North, Manhattan, KS 66506-0110 shalin@k-state.edu 785-532-5262

Thanks! The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (ANVC) has created and supported Scalar through these years. Scalar is a wonderful tool for public use.

Note: The presenter has no official tie with ANVC.

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