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Table of Contents

  • Deliverables
  • The Site versus The Dissertation
  • Deliverable Details
  • Scope

Deliverables

This file attempts to define the scope of my (Amanda Visconti's) literature Ph.D. dissertation. The dissertation is best described by its deliverables (see below for a detailed description of each item):

  1. The Infinite Ulysses participatory digital edition
  2. Usability and use testing analysis
  3. Blogging throughout the dissertation
  4. Multimedia scholarly article polished draft
  5. Umbrella site encompassing the above four pieces and other dissertational miscellanea

You'll also want to check out my Manifest file for an ongoing specific list of what I've produced during this dissertation.

The Site versus The Dissertation

As much as I could work on the site full-time and be happy, I'm designing it as part of a dissertation because I love the research it allows me to pursue—so it's important that I keep a distinction between the website I'm building (InfiniteUlysses.com) and the dissertation I'm conducting through and around that building.

When I discuss the website, I tend to focus on issues related to reading:

  • design for a more public humanities conversation
  • analytics for how people move around the site
  • features aimed at first-time readers of Ulysses or people otherwise new to one of its related themes (e.g. Joyce, Modernism, literary studies, the digital humanities, and digital editions) and the commonplaces and tacit knowledge that can get someone up to speed participating in the conversation around a literary text

When I discuss the overall dissertational project, I tend to talk about issues related to annotation:

  • what makes an "edition"? a "scholarly" edition?
  • "edition literacies" (e.g. how we imagine various meta-structures for scholarly communication with and around a text; think of McGann's discussion of Gabler's synoptic markings of Ulysses as a new language of reading)
  • theory versus analytic data about encounters with "subdued" (hypertextualized, hyperannotated) complex Modernisms

The Research Questions

All my dissertational activity is aimed at exploring the following questions:

  1. How can we design digital archives and editions that are not just public, but invite and assist participation from both trained academics and the lay person in our love for the nuances of a text’s materiality, history, and meaning?
  2. How can we borrow successful social mechanics from existing online communities (things like upvoting and tagging) to create reading and research experiences that adeptly handle not only issues of user-generated contextual annotation quantity but also quality?
  3. What happens to complex texts—especially those purposefully authored to be hypertextual, chaotic, and encyclopedic, like Ulysses—when a participatory digital edition places them under heavy and thorough annotation and conversation?

Deliverables details

  1. The Infinite Ulysses participatory digital edition (live Drupal site allowing annotation and discussion of the text, various ways of customizing your reading experience and curating your own "edition" of annotations, and pages about the project with information on IP, design decisions, etc.)
  2. Usability and use testing analysis from volunteer alpha testing and Winter/Spring 2015 individual and teacher/class beta testing. Testing will include online surveys, talk-aloud and paired observations both in-person and via Google Hangouts, A/B testing of book page design, email conversations.
  3. Blogging from throughout the dissertation on the process of scholarly building (LiteratureGeek.com), feeding into a
  4. Online scholarly article in polished draft form (suitable for submission for publication, but the dissertation will not be dependent on the article's acceptance to a publication). This article (or project narrative, as I'm starting to think of it) will introduce the project and its scholarly precedents and discuss the usability study and what I learned regarding the three core research questions (above). I'll seek publication with this article with a venue that handles multimedia scholarships, such as Vectors or DHQ. I may frame this not as a traditional scholarly article (which somewhat limits what I can discuss) but as the kind of critical narrative (encompassing both synthesis and analysis) I'd like to see arise out of more DH building projects. The results and discussion sections will take a social science form (as with my master's thesis).
  5. Umbrella site: a place linking to all other pieces of the dissertation (the edition, blog posts, any code repos, etc.)

Scope

The scope of this project recognizes that I'm creating a humanities dissertation, and that all work should therefore

  1. contribute to the overall research agenda (as outlined in the three research questions above), and

  2. be of reasonable breadth and depth for a doctoral capstone project (the "standard" length being three years, from the third through fifth years of the degree)

As with any digital tool serving a community, there will always be neat features to add, bugs to fix, and requests to provide a functionality that is essential to someone's use. I'm grateful to everyone that visits my site, and especially to those who take the time to tell me what they thought of it, how they used it, and what changes they'd like to see.

These are the in-scope features of the site:

  • readers can highlight pieces of the text and add written annotations that are saved and viewable by all site visitors
  • readers can highlight pieces of the text and ask questions about it
  • readers can tag, upvote (thumbs up/down), and add a comment (single, non-threaded) to any annotation
  • readers can click on highlighted text to read existing annotations customized to their interests through toggling, filtering, and sorting by tag, authoring date, author, and community upvoting

All work I spend time on during the dissertation should contribute to the overall research project, which means that anything beyond those basic features listed above will probably be earmarked as out of scope for while I'm dissertating. For example, I won't be providing a site friendly to reading on cell phones, as this extra work doesn't support my overall research. I will try to provide tablet theming if it is easy to do as part of the general site theming (depending on how well the plugin to allow touch interaction with annotations works)—if something is very easy to accomplish, I'm more likely to have time for it.

I'm expecting users to have many good ideas for the site that I'll want to earmark for future building, but (except for bugs and any really use-preventing mechanisms on the site), I should be done making additions to the website by the end of February 2015. This will help me keep track of the versions of the site in use when specific user-testing was conducted, as well as ascertain all current features are polished enough for my intended Bloomsday 2015 1.0 site release. More importantly, this choice helps me remember that all work on the site until I defend is only one piece of the overall dissertational project, and that it's best both for me and for my site users that I defend my dissertation in a timely manner (as I'll have more free time to improve the site once I'm done with school).

I'm managing the inexhaustible demands of the website with two approaches: a data collection cap and a public issues queue.

Data collection cap

Usability and use testers like to say that you can find out 90% (totally anecdatal number) of a site's problems and real in-the-wild usage in the first two weeks of testing. For a study of how people read a complex book—one that often takes months or years to read offline—using a web tool, you really want years of site analytics and user feedback. Because I'd like to defend my dissertation at a reasonable date, I'm balancing these two amounts of time and setting my initial data collection phase as two months long, with the understanding that different patterns of use will emerge as site use grows and reading time passes.

I'll begin user testing at the beginning of January 2015, with group testing (user in book clubs, classes, and other groups) at the end of January 2015. By capping data collection in March, I'll have enough initial data to glean some useful findings from the site for my dissertational narrative of the project. Data collection/user testing will, of course, continue after this point, but I won't be waiting on further data to finish my dissertation, and I'll probably switch to less formal methods of data-gathering.

Issues Queue

Future tasks for the site will be listed publicly in this repository's issues queue (note that I won't have moved all tasks here from my private Basecamp until mid-Spring 2015), with good ideas, fixes, or requests that I can't attend to as part of the dissertation marked with the "Out of Scope" label. This lets me acknowledge users' suggestions and track them for later work, while also prioritizing work required to complete the dissertation. It also allows others to work on these tasks if they choose—if some feature is really necessary to your use of the site, you're welcome to use my code plus the instructions for replicating my site I'll provide to start on the issue yourself.