There’s More Than One Way to Skin a Book: Experimental Interfaces for Reading Illustrated Books

Abstract

<jats:p>Different readers approach a text in different ways and for different reasons, so designers of interfaces for electronic reading and scholarship must strive for flexibility. Eric Gill’s illustrations for the Golden Cockerel Press invite exploration into the social function of erotic texts, public versus private reading, fine book-making practices, and more, and we hope to provide the tools to allow scholars to engage with these texts in their multiplicity. There may also be readers who just want to read the texts and look at the pictures, and we need to make sure we do not ignore their needs. Most importantly, there are, or will be, readers who want to interact with the texts in ways that we cannot imagine, and we need to do all we can to make this experimentation possible.</jats:p>

Drupal, TEI and XML: How to prototype a digital humanities tool?

“…We could not design in a vacuum, and we had to imagine this prototype in use. Although no one on our team is an expert in lexicography, in Johnson nor in the eighteenth century, we found – exactly as Bath and Harkema (2013, p. 4) note – that we could not begin the prototyping process without first considering the kinds of questions are likely to be asked of this material. Subject expertise must meet technical expertise to develop a useful and successful digital humanities interface.…”

“…To ask new questions of a text and to pursue new methods to investigate a text, digitization projects must make use of sophisticated metadata, coding and data storage tools. Indeed, as Bath and Harkema (2013, p. 4) suggest, the best digital humanities interfaces do more than simply make a text available for viewing ; these tools make a text available for study . Similarly, Crompton and Siemens (2013, p. 3) argue that a successful digital humanities interfaces “ […] offers new ways of ordering and therefore encountering textual content”.…”

Back to basics

“…The use of Islandora, DSpace, Archivematica and Drupal as frameworks for multiple kinds of digital projects is still in its infancy at the U of S Library, but investment in the technology has enabled the library to partner with several DH researchers and cultural heritage groups who were seeking support and a place to house digital projects. Some examples include Dr Angela Kalinowski’s searchable repository of open access images of athletics in the Greek and Roman world[4]; Natalia Khanenko-Friesen’s Oral History of 20th Street project[5]; research into the use of images and oral histories in the Adrian Paton Collection[6] (Harkema and Carlson, 2018); Eric Gill’s Illustrations for the Golden Cockerel Press (in development) (Bath and Harkema, 2013); the Broadway Business Improvement District’s heritage building project[7]; and the Sask History and Folklore society image collection[8]. The library has also been involved in developing digital projects that utilize the strengths of existing digital platforms such as the City of Saskatoon public art works augmented reality tour[9] using Historypin (Harkema and Nygren, 2012).…”