Linking research & learning technologies through standards

We have already presented the People Australia and the Register My Data initiatives, and their different approaches to encoding information about parties and their identity. We elsewhere walk through a comparison of their schemata, which consists of a walkthrough the schemata, and a discussion of points of disparity. We first compare People Australia with ISO 2146 proper, before comparing ISO 2146 with RIF-CS.

Our comparison is motivated by the fact that ANDS will be using People Australia as a primary resource for researcher identity. The comparison is specific to the process of importing People Australia metadata into the format required for Register My Data.
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We have seen in a previous post that different representations of identity are possible, because there are different business motivations for knowing a party’s identity. Depending on the use we put the identity to, different kinds of detail need to be gathered about a party.

There are two major initiatives for identifying parties being considered at the moment in Australian e-research. Register My Data aims to improve the discovery of research data through the Australian Research Data Commons, and People Australia aims to improve the discovery of resources by and about people and organisations generally. The initiatives do not address exactly the same business concerns, so the metadata they gather are different.
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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.

The business of a library is to establish authoritative identities for the works they make available. That is why libraries put together authority files, as unambiguous names for authors: those are the names books are indexed under, and searched under in library catalogues. There are several advantages of having an unambiguous identity for an author are obvious. A researcher who wants credit for their work—or the department whose funding depends on it—doesn’t want credit to go to another researcher with the same name. Anyone collecting royalties on their published work will want their identity to be unambiguous as well—though not all fields of research make it as worthwhile to chase after residuals.

Library users also appreciate disambiguation: if I am looking for works by or about the contemporary German novelist Richard Wagner (1952- ), I’d like to avoid the deluge of works by or about the slightly more famous German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883). And a library catalogue is being helpful when it includes the dates of birth to differentiate between the two Richard Wagners—just as Wikipedia is, when it refers to Richard_Wagner_(novelist).

Making those kinds of distinctions depends on having good enough metadata on the authors. If you’ve publishing a dead-tree book in the past few decades, your national library has been in cahoots with your publisher to make sure they have that metadata. *I* don’t remember giving the Library of Congress my year of birth, but it avoids a car dealer in Florida getting credit for any books I’ve written. (See Libraries Australia.)
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Reflections on e-Humanities workshop, Melbourne e-Research Scholarship Centre, 2009-08-12

Building generic ICT infrastructure to support humanities research seems to be a difficult task. The standard approach is to

1. collect a bunch of usage stories from different communities
2. infer common business processes based on those stories
3. build infrastructure that supports those business processes

The theory is that a community would then take the generic infrastructure and customise it to meet their particular needs. The problem is that there is something about the humanities that makes generic business processes hard to find.

We’ve blogged previously about the Project Bamboo approach to finding generic e-Humanities business processes. Project Bamboo certainly had difficulty converting its scholarly narratives into common recipes. Maybe there aren’t any processes common to the different strands of humanities research? Unlikely. Rather, the fierce independence of humanities researchers makes it difficult to infer commonalities. Suggesting to a humanities researcher that she might have a research process in common with her peers carries with it an inference that her research is not unique. Even uttering the phrase “business process”  can put humanities researchers offside (some of them conflate business and commerce).

In this context, there was a little nervousness leading up to the Interconnections and Services in the eHumanities: Reflecting on Current Initiatives workshop hosted by the University of Melbourne eScholarship Research Centre on 12 August.
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