Alberto Stefanini¹, Anika Nicolosi², Monica Monachini³
¹ Novareckon, Novara, Italy - alberto_stefanini@libero.it² Dip. Discipline Umanistiche, Sociali e delle Imprese Culturali, Parma University, Italy - anika.nicolosi@unipr.it ³ ILC-CNR, Pisa, Italy - monica.monachini@ilc.cnr.it
ABSTRACT
This paper overviews ongoing experiments on a digital edition of Archilochus which is based on the readings, translations and comments by Nicolosi [1] and also integrates feedback and requirements from the Digital Classics community. The experiment encompasses a few fragments of the poet of Paros, so as to provide a mock-up of the prototype for evaluation by its intended end-users, in view of developing a fully fledged digital edition. The mock-up provides the philologist with a set of resources and tools that ease a critical appraisal of the text.
KEYWORDS
Digital methods in the humanities, Interfaces and user-friendly data presentation
1. INTRODUCTION
When adapting an existing text to a digital format, the key concern is how to exploit to the best user profit the ample repertory of solutions and resources digitalization may offer. These include all the features a hypertext provides, through linking the target text to other texts that, according to Genette [1]: intertextual (quotation, plagiarism, allusion), metatextual (i.e. through a critic, reflexive relationship), architextual (as belonging to a literary genre) paratextual (i.e. with its textual periphery) or hypertextual (the relation between a text and a preceding hypotext; examples are parody, spoof, sequel, and translation). These relationships may also include reference to existing databases, where witness are digitized, to imagery (of objects, paysages and tools referred by the poet) and geographical databases, where places referred by the text are described. They may refer to linguistic resources such as dictionaries, logical and syntactic analysers, automatic translators.
Existing off-the-shelf solutions provide an interface that basically mimics the printed page of a commentary book. A far more flexible and user friendly solution may be envisaged: to this aim a mock-up of an e-book was prototyped. The intended audience for the e-book are university students and scholars. The mock-up provides and collects support resources and tools that cope with the outcomes of a survey on the use of digital resources and related tools in Ancient Greek scholarship, performed through a questionnaire to ascertain the current practice and the related needs within a group of practitioners in the field1.
2. MOTIVATION AND OUTLINE
Until the early 2000s, critical digital editions have replicated the print edition model, both in terms of product (i.e. materials included and how they are accessed) and process (i.e. how they are and how they can be used). Only after 2003 this model began to be forced by exploring the potential of the world wide web [2]. At the same time, the development of digital imaging technology and their dissemination on the create repertoires of images of the original witness. However, ten years of intense activity (since the mid-1990s) in the production of critical digital editions have not led to a shared model: the discipline of Digital Humanities has not elaborated a commonly agreed definition of what a digital edition is.
As production of a digital edition is a large endeavour and requires collaboration by a team of persons, its development must follow an iterative practice, where from user needs analysis, users profiles are defined, prototypes of the digital product are produced and are evaluated in a somewhat formalized way, so that the product is modified to undergo a further evaluation stage. The design of specialized digital editions may be inspired by the life cycle of traditional editions but should also adhere to the principles of web design, which make iterative project design and evaluation a fundamental principle: a graphic object
1 The survey (http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11752/OPEN-86) targeted the scientific community dealing with Digital Classics; it was performed on a restricted sample of Italian digital humanists with focus of interest on ancient Greek philology. The survey was performed from May to September 2016 and it is now available on-line at http://www.clarin-it.it/it/content/sondaggio-current-practice-digital-classics- tools.
must be beautiful to see and inspire confidence also through its aesthetic qualities [3].2 These remarks are consistent with a
number of studies concerning the way humanists approach and make use of material available on the web [4] [5] [6], all of them stressing on a set of recommendations that emphasize interface usability, whose key tenet are iterative design and evaluation. In that respect, it is necessary to distinguish between wireframes, mock-ups and prototypes. The wireframe is a black and white, low cost sketch of the main views of an interface, since it is basically a sketch on a drawing board or equivalent graphic tool. A mock-up is a more detailed design in which the detailed color rendering display and the fonts to be used are developed. It is an intermediate step to building a protototype of the interface, which is obviously a rather costly operation, since it is essentially an interface design that preludes to full software implementation. A mock-up and even more a prototype allows a fairly comprehensive evaluation of the interface. This can be done with semi-quantitative criteria, by developing an appropriate metric and a questionnaire to evaluate a user's reaction to mock-ups. An extensive bibliography on the methodologies for evaluating websites can be consulted, see a recent work by [7].
The mock-up we present below3 may be considered as an augmented digital edition compared to a simple digitization of a
paper text, as it has a set of features that a simple digital edition does not present such as: • a basic hypertext structure
• multimedia integration of text, images and graphics • integration of material from multiple sources • textual search tools
• reading support tools such as online translation, vocabulary, syntactic tree consultation
The view shows the so called general functions, encompassing translation, metrics, and bibliography, the syntactic tree of the fragment, the sources, some linguistic peculiarity and geographic information through invocation of the geographic databes Pleiades. The buttons ‘introduzione generale’ and ‘bibliografia’ switch to full pages where a general introduction to the fragment and its bibliography are given, respectively. Worth also noticing that the Greek text is hyperlinked to Perseus4 in
order to access its Greek word study tool and its online dictionaries through it.
2 This book provides principles for the design of interfaces for publishing in the field of visual arts and focuses on how to make browsing more interesting and flexible, assist the cognitive path of the reader and search for recurring graphic motifs. As noted by Pierazzo, the topic has so far received little attention in the Digital Humanities sector, although it is today a key theme linked to the enormous development of the world wide web.
3 The mock-up (https://dspace-clarin-it.ilc.cnr.it/repository/xmlui/handle/20.500.11752/OPEN-83) is implemented in PowerPoint and heavily exploits its animation function. The choice of overlapping tiles is to some extent unavoidable in order to concentrate in a few slides all available functions. The ‘less’ button usually allows to clear overlapping. A concrete action plan for its implementation should offer a new workbench and a data repository in which to insert text in a simple and intuitive way and visualize its encoding with specific TEI transcription; provide apparatus, literature and translation, link together primary sources.
4 Perseus (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/research) is a digital library whose ‘larger mission is to make the full record of humanity -
linguistic sources, physical artifacts, historical spaces - as intellectually accessible as possible to every human being, regardless of linguistic or cultural background… within this larger mission, we focus on three categories of access:
Human readable information: digitized images of objects, places, inscriptions, and printed pages, geographic information, and other
digital representations of objects and spaces.
Machine actionable knowledge: catalogue records, encyclopedia articles, lexicon entries, and other structured information sources… Machine generated knowledge: by analyzing existing information automated systems can produce new knowledge. Machine actionable
The figure above shows a screenshot of the textual analysis where the open windows show the comments about the ἐν δορὶ and the ἐν δορὶ κεκλιµένος sentences. On the latter, note 30 was open by clicking on the relevant button on the text. The former shows the first sentence of the comment only, clicking on the ‘more’ button switches to a separate slide where the complete text is given.
3. CURRENT WORK AND CONCLUSIVE REMARKS
The mock-up is currently undergoing evaluation by a small sample of prospective users (university students attending a Greek Literature course) in view of in future system developments, to better focus on product requirements (a complete digital edition of Archilochus5). Evaluation follows a proper protocol to collect feedback from a small sample of learners, Students will be required to perform individually two distinct but similar tasks:
a) using traditional bibliographic tools b) using mock-up support.
After adequate time, at the end of the test, each student, wich was informed of the purpose of the experimentation and was shown how to use of the mock-up in advance, shall complete a questionnaire. The data collected through the questionnaires shall be analysed with due account of:
• the individual students' basic skills and preparation
• the quality of the results produced by the individual students in the given task (insufficient, satisfactory, good, excellent)
We expect to have evaluation results available by February and give directions to the design team about further product development.
4. REFERENCES
[1] A. Nicolosi, Archiloco, Elegie, Bologna: Patron, 2013.
[2] G. Genette, Palimpsestes. La Littérature au second degré, Parigi: Edition du Seuil, 1982.
[3] P. Robinson, «Where We Are With Electronic Scholarly Editions, And Where We Want To Be,» Università di Monaco, Monaco D, 2004.
[4] S. Ruecker, M. Radzikowska e S. Sinclar, Visual Interface Design for Digital Cultural Heritage: a Guide to Rich-Prospect Browsing, Oxford: Routledge, 2011.
[5] E. G. Toms e H. L. O'Brien, «Understanding the Information,» Journal of Documentation, 64 , pp. 102-130, http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00220410810844178, 2008.
[6] N. Audenaert e R. Furuta, «What Humanists Want: How Scholars Use Source Materials,» in JCDL '10: Proceedings of the 10th Annual Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, New York, NY, 2010.
[7] C. Warwick, I. Galina, M. Terras, P. Huntington e N. Pappa, «The Master Builders: LAIRAH research on Good Practice in the Construction of Digital Hunmanities Projects,» Literary and Linguistic Computing, 23, pp. 383-396, http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/13810/, 2008.
[8] D. Fogli e G. Guida, «A practical approach to the assessment of quality in use ofcorporate web sites,» The Journal of Systems and Software, pp. 52-65, 2015.