Digital Texts 2.0
Towards Social Networking of Texts
Presented at CaSTA 2008: New Directions in Text Analysis
October 18th, 2008
Dr. Stéfan Sinclair Shawn Day
Johnny Rodgers McMaster University
Simon Fraser University McMaster University
sgs@mcmaster.ca shawn@shawnday.com
johnny@creativecreature.ca

Overview
Our goal is to experiment with new ways of finding,
managing, and using digital texts, with a particular emphasis
on social networking practices and modern web technologies.
Digital Texts 2.0
http://dtext2.org
or find us on Facebook at
http://apps.facebook.com/digitaltexts
Feedback?
johnny@creativecreature.ca
sgs@mcmaster.ca
Digital Texts 2.0 http://dtext2.org Johnny Rodgers & Dr. Stéfan Sinclair

Social Networking
photos
videos
bookmarks
people
texts
?
Digital Texts 2.0 http://dtext2.org Johnny Rodgers & Dr. Stéfan Sinclair

Evolution of Digital Texts
Digital Text 1.0 Digital Text 2.0
embedded associations through
hypertextual links social tagging
objects associated
independent objects
with people
focus on
focus on uses
content (encoding)
analytic procedures “mashability”
Digital Texts 2.0 http://dtext2.org Johnny Rodgers & Dr. Stéfan Sinclair

Evolution of Digital Texts
Digital Text 1.0 Digital Text 2.0
embedded associations through
hypertextual links social tagging
objects associated
independent objects
with people
focus on
focus on uses
content (encoding)
analytic procedures “mashability”
Digital Texts 2.0 http://dtext2.org Johnny Rodgers & Dr. Stéfan Sinclair

Digital Texts 2.0
What if you could...
build a text collection collaboratively?
annotate and tag texts?
recommend texts or see what others are reading?
use web services to import text metadata?
tap into students’ enthusiasm for Facebook?
Digital Texts 2.0 http://dtext2.org Johnny Rodgers & Dr. Stéfan Sinclair

Demo

Challenges
only modest use (130 users, 20 active)
little promotion, beta, difficult to get buy-in
need for Facebook account
privacy (USA), mainstream vs. academic uses
defining “digital text”
full text or referent, metadata, content, uses, usage
not yet integrated with text analysis tools
citation generation, data mining, TAPoR
Digital Texts 2.0 http://dtext2.org Johnny Rodgers & Dr. Stéfan Sinclair

Successes
feature-rich application in short time
open source tools, iterative development, agility
participation of beta-testers
online since day one, active participation of users
useful knowledge for next phase (TAPoR 2.0)
preliminary data design model for social networking
learn from experiences
paid for my year in New Zealand!
Digital Texts 2.0 http://dtext2.org Johnny Rodgers & Dr. Stéfan Sinclair

Summary
Our goal is to experiment with new ways of finding,
managing, and using digital texts, with a particular emphasis
on social networking practices and modern web technologies.
Digital Texts 2.0
http://dtext2.org
or find us on Facebook at
http://apps.facebook.com/digitaltexts
Feedback?
johnny@creativecreature.ca
sgs@mcmaster.ca
Digital Texts 2.0 http://dtext2.org Johnny Rodgers & Dr. Stéfan Sinclair

Thanks!
Digital Texts 2.0 Team
Stéfan Sinclair, Johnny Rodgers, Shawn Day, Geoffrey
Rockwell, Stan Ruecker, Susan Brown, Peter Organisciak,
Amanda Etches-Johnson, Krista Godfrey
SSHRC RDI (primary funding)
TAPoR (computing infrastructure)
CaSTA (conference support)
SFU SIAT (conference support)
Digital Texts 2.0 http://dtext2.org Johnny Rodgers & Dr. Stéfan Sinclair