Linking research & learning technologies through standards

For the last few years, tools to allow people to collaboratively annotate websites and other online objects have started to emerge as something researchers want. For example Annocryst is popular for collaboratively annotating 3D crystallographic models, and the University of Melbourne’s e-Scholarship Research Centre has identified online annotation as a highly desirable feature for their Online Heritage Resource Manager software.

However, there doesn’t seem to be a killer app for annotating web pages, and even Zotero — very popular in the e-Humanities — has limited uptake, since it only works in Firefox.

Ron Chernich (University of Queensland)’s live demonstration of a new annotation tool called Danno, at eResearch Australasia, was interesting for three reasons [abstract, presentation]: he explained why browser extensions are bad, he demonstrated an alternative approach using cross-browser javascript, and third, people started using it: right there, in the presentation!

What’s wrong with browser extensions

Most annotation tools used in e-research are browser extensions. While this has gotten the community a long way, there are limitations. In a nutshell:

• They’re completely browser-specific, multiplying development effort: a Firefox plugin has to be completely rewritten for IE, Safari, Opera, etc.
• They require installation and browser restart, increasing the barrier to entry. (Even that little bit matters)
• They run with a high level of privileges, potentially compromising user security.
• As they can conflict with a group’s Standard Operating Environment, they may require the approval and support of the IT department to install.

Danno: using cross-browser JavaScript

The UQ team were asked to develop a collaborative annotation service for the Atlas of Living Australia with one rule: no browser plugins. They took up the challenge,  finding a way to make  JavaScript work for any website. Their solution, Danno, works with two different models:

• “Danno-friendly” sites include some scripts at the top to add features like showing and editing any annotations on the current page.
• Unenhanced sites can be seen through a “Repeater” – effectively a single-use proxy server that injects the required JavaScript on the way through. Using a bookmarklet makes this a one-click operation for any page.

Getting JavaScript to work across all browsers is hard, of course. But they managed.

Result: people used it!

The really remarkable thing about the presentation was that no sooner had Ron shown the URL to the demo page, than audience members started spontaneously trying it out. It was pretty easy: hover over an annotation and click “Reply to Annotation”. Or find the “Dannotate” link (again, best used as a bookmarklet), and create a new one. You can even annotate regions within images. By taking away any requirement to install anything or even register as a user, participation just happened.

For comparison, there exists another tool, Diigo, with some of these features, and which can also operate without a plugin, but it is designed to require a username and password, retaining some barrier to entry.

No doubt, extensions like Zotero work well within in institution where there is IT support, a high level of engagement with a project, and everyone is using the same platform. But approaches like Danno might work better in distributed projects, with less engagement from prospective members (ie, barrier to entry matters more), and where support for a given browser extension cannot be guaranteed.

Introducing SUM Composition Diagrams

In our continuing quest to help identify common services for generic infrastructure, we present a modular extension to the e-Framework. In the e-Framework, a Service Usage Model (SUM) usually represents an orchestration of services to support a few closely related business processes in a particular context. We are instead developing SUMs that group generic functionality useful in a wide range of contexts. To make this work, we need a notation more precise than standard SUM diagrams: SUM Composition Diagrams. Details below the fold.

A SUM Composition diagram for a collaborative biographical encyclopaedia. A forthcoming blog post will describe this SUM and its components in detail.

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Project Bamboo is an Andrew W Mellon Foundation-sponsored project that aims to dramatically improve the way digital technologies are used in humanities research, with a particular focus on shared services infrastructure. The main participants are humanities departments and libraries in major US universities such as Chicago and Berkley, but overseas universities including Cambridge, Oxford, ANU and the University of Melbourne are represented.

Founded in March 2008, Project Bamboo has run five workshops to turn input from the e-Scholarship community into a proposal which it will submit to the Andrew W Mellon Foundation at the end of 2009. The proposal will describe a 7-10 year process, but will focus heavily on implementation in years 1 and 2.

As the project has developed, its thinking has evolved. The project began in more optimistic financial conditions, and implicitly supported a very wide agenda to be realised over ten years. This includes shared services, an extensive, ongoing business analysis model (scholarly narratives, recipes, activities in theme groups, and a marketplace for goods, services for labour (Bamboo Exchange). The project argues that with a solid service based infrastructure supporting reusable applications and tools across different institutions, the cost and effort of using technology in humanities research will be reduced, with many new benefits. With the current global financial situation, the project’s immediate scope has become focused on two parts:

• The Bamboo Services Platform is a cloud-based environment which will host shared services useful to researchers in e-Humanities. They will include existing services and applications re-engineered for the new platform, as well as novel services created to fill identified niches.
• The Bamboo Commons is a broad discovery mechanism that allows Bamboo participants to find Bamboo services, tools, business analysis – and each other.

Link Affiliates has submitted two recipes and is using the e-Framework to model solutions to the problems they pose. The e-Framework with its principled binding of services analysis to business requirements is well positioned to offer a structured approach to the problem of interoperability of services, tools, content and business processes within the digital humanities sector.