iBooks Author App and the Page

Easy to customize pages with the iBooks Author app.

I came across the iBooks Author app in my Exhibition Project course this week. A guest speaker  spoke to the class about the use of technology in museums. She mentioned that a lot of museums, like the Guggenheim and the Ontario Science Centre, are starting to use the iBooks Author app to publish exhibition guides, educational and programming pamphlets, and museum reports.

Apple describes the app as a simple program that can be used by anyone to publish a beautiful multi-sensory iBook. Putting aside the negative ramifications surrounding Apple’s newest attempt to take over the publishing business, iBooks Author adds some really interesting elements to the form of the page.

  

Watch their promotional video here!

 

The app makes it ridiculously easy to create a book through the preformatted templates provided by Apple. Adding content is as easy as clicking and dragging finished content into the page area. From there you can easily change the format of headings and text if you want to, and any images added immediately rearrange the text to fit wherever they are placed on the page. 

Examples of the templates available within the app.

This app reinvents the page through the widgets included with iBooks Author. The video on Apple’s webpage describes the widget as dynamic multi touch sensory options that can be added to your page. Some of the elements which can be easily added include a gallery of images with individual captions (which are instantly formatted through the template options chosen at the beginning of the iBook), interactive objects and maps, full screen videos, keynote animations, 3D images, audio, and there is even an HTML widget which connects to the internet and allows the images and information within the iBook stay up to date. You can use more than one widget on a page, thus any page can have text, a photo gallery, an instructional video, an interactive animation, and more.

Example of a page with an audio widget.

Personally, I think the neatest page characteristic within iBooks Author app is that by switching your view from landscape view to portrait view you inadvertently switch the type of information displayed on the page. In landscape view the text and associated widgets exist contemporaneously. Yet when the reader switches the iPad into portrait view, the text becomes the main focus of the page while the widgets are shrunk and placed along the left hand border. Without the widgets the reading of the text is a lot simpler and straightforward, basically creating a completely different reading experience between portrait and landscape view. 

I have never read or created an iBook through this app, but the implications surrounding reading styles, learning, and publishing are worth exploring.

Digital Pop-Up Books & Augmented Reality

A couple of weeks ago I came across a book of poetry called Between Page and Screen, published by Siglio Press. The weird thing about this book of poetry is that there isn’t a single poem in the book, but rather a series of hieroglyphic symbols (which sort of look like QR codes) that, when scanned by any webcam, will display a 3D rendering of the poem: “The poems that appear […] do not exist on either page or screen, but in the augmented space between them opened up by the reader” (from their website). 

While I was watching the video (available here), a related video about a Jekyll and Hyde Augmented Reality Book popped up in the sidebar.  The idea is the same: as you read, elements of the page are scanned and then projected to you on your computer screen.  For example, on one page, Hyde’s shadow skulks across the screen.  (I couldn't embed the video here, but you really should go at watch it here.) 

Personally I couldn’t imagine reading a book like this, and the technology—at least so far—seems best geared towards children’s books or certain types of genre fiction, like horror (for some reason I am reminded of that scene from the Goosebumps opening sequence when the golden retriever’s eyes flash green—which is still the most frightening thing I have ever seen) or mystery (maybe clues could be revealed this way or something).

Otherwise, I think this technology paired with a more traditional (?) piece of literature would prove to be really distracting and ultimately unnecessary—kind of like when someone first discovers the animation possibilities for a PowerPoint presentation (as my mum did this past reading week, and proceeded to create a truly terrible presentation that utilized nearly every animation element available).  I’m having a really hard time trying to imagine what reading an augmented reality version of Wuthering Heights (I hope Kate Bush would somehow be involved) or Anna Karenina (hopefully Keira Knightley would not be involved) might be like, but I don't think that I would like it.  I'm also not sure how many times the experience could be repeated.  One of the great things about reading is that you can re-read a book several times, and with each reading, new elements are revealed.  But so far, at least with the Jekyll and Hyde example, the augmented features seem finite, and perhaps not worth re-reading. 

So although it seems like an exciting new way to interpret literature visually and offers all of these new ways to read a book, I wonder if it doesn't actually place more limitations on the text instead. 

But it's also just really weird.  If I'm reading a book, I want to read a book--I don't particularly want to watch myself on a screen watching a book become animated.

#5 an Inkling

The Inkling app for Ipad, Iphone, and computer use offers a new way to interact with textbooks.  Here is the link to their home page:
https://www.inkling.com/
While they offer a wide range of books, I think what they offer is most interesting for textbooks.  When viewing a page of a textbook, you can highlight text and make your own notes.  That's nothing particularly novel.  You can also view the notes of other people who have bought that text book.  If you find a note that is particularly useful, you can rate it so that others will pay attention to it.  You can even have chat sessions with other people that have the same textbook.
This allows the user to recreate a study group in a digital environment right from their etextbook.  What I especially like about this app is that it also gives new tools to in person study groups.  Instead of having to read over your neighbor's shoulder to see the precise line they are talking about, they can just highlight it in their ebook copy and you can see their highlight on your copy right away.  I like that this app allows for a wholly digital experience, but doesn't preclude face to face interactions and in fact enhances them. 

Avengers App: Is this a Game or a Graphic Novel? Is it Both?

Extraordinary Crimes Against People and the State must be Avenged

What happens when text or story line becomes overshadowed by the graphics, image layout, interface, and interactive features?

In an attempt to download the Disney app Jeremy discussed in a post a few days ago, I stumbled across a digital, interactive graphic novel. It is a free app on Amazon's Kindle called Marvel's The Avengers: Iron Man - Mark VII.  It was created by Loud Crow Interactive Inc. which makes a lot of interactive apps for kids, namely ones from the Charlie Brown series. They take children's classics and make them fun interactive game-style books; one example being, PopOut! The Night Before Christmas.

The Avengers graphic novel on Kindle has some standard features that has become expected in children's book apps: the ability to have the novel read aloud to you and to swipe to the next page at your leisure, allowing you to look at the comic art work to your hearts content.  

Someone has recorded the app onto Youtube. Watch a few seconds of this video to get an idea of what the app is all about: 

Take the first comic box for example. What you can't see in the video is that to get the guns to shoot you need to click on them with your finger. That's part of the interactive experience.

Rather than enhancing the Iron Man story, I see a lot of fun interactive features that distracts from the story line. The optional features that do not pertain to the story, such as making Iron Man fly too high into the atmosphere will yield prizes or tokens which the user is meant to collect as bonus material.  Taking the time to explore all the interactive options really makes reading the graphic novel disjointed.  The reader is encouraged to explore the interactive features on the screen - by clicking on boxes, machines, gun, faces, etc - and is then rewarded for their efforts with collectible tokens. Finding these tokens is an optional task to endeavor between reading pages of the story.  To find a "security token", for example, you may help Iron Man aim his weapon at the assailants. Trying to discover the interactive features in the app, I think, breaks up the user's experience as a reader. The story line falls to the wayside and the user becomes more interested in discovering the next interactive feature of the page. 

The app features exciting background music, interactive explosions, collectibles, and other challenges that engages the user but shifts the focus away from the story. This app had me mindlessly clicking all over the screen just to find out what items are interactive. The interactive component lets users do interesting things, such as putting on or taking off Iron Man's suit or causing Iron Man to shoot fire from his hand-flame-thrower-thing. In this case, the digital graphic novel is less of a book and more of a game to discover what images are interactive.     

The visual and auditory components of this app are very detailed. So much so, I experienced a bit of sensory overload. True, the sensory overload may have enhanced my experience of Iron Man as a character, it still de-emphasized the content of the story. Too many bells and whistles. Walking away from the app, I remember it more as an interactive game than a mini graphic novel. 

It may be more accurate to say that this app is a game that takes place over the landscape of a graphic novel.  The graphic novel is just a means on which an interactive experience is played out. The layers of interactive experiences (the music, the sounds of guns firing, the moving images, the searching for and collecting of items and so much more) are all layered on top of a story to the point that it is almost unrecognizable as a graphic novel.  It is certainly a departure from the traditional understanding of a graphic novel - on print or in e-book format.  I'd be interesting to hear if you think this a good thing or bad thing. Do you disagree that all the interactive fluff distracts from the plot? 

One redeeming quality is the narrator (if you choose to have narration), by virtue of reading the page aloud, does a pretty good job of reminding the reader that there is a story to be enjoyed here.  And I concede that it could be a good thing to add some sensory stimulation - but the Marvel's the Avengers app is overkill.

Experiments with the page - The Negro Speaks of Rivers

This weeks blog topic helped me to realize that I should perhaps spend more time looking for experimental books. Even as an avid e-book reader, I don't usually wander far from the page or its e-representation.
In this weeks post I wander a bit from the concept of book, because what is a book anyway? After the first six weeks of this course I am not so sure about my gut answer to that question anymore.
Recently NPR asked three comic book illustrators to illustrate something that inspires them. The illustrator Afua Richardson chose to illustrate Langston Hughes's poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." Here is where we depart from any classical notion of a book. The illustration is published to a blog on a web page. Below is a little snapshot of the page.

Contrast the above with Langston's own handwritten copy for reading on the radio.

Retrieved from http://academic.reed.edu/english/courses/eng211/images/NegroSpeaksofRivers.jpg

So please, check out both versions of the poem, but best of all, listen to Langston Hughes read it.
I really like the NPR's experiment with the idea of a poem on a page. The illustration lends itself to the rich imagery of the poem, while the shortness of the poem gives breathing space to consider one's own feelings about each line. However, the beauty of the illustration that makes this e-page a success is also its downfall. It's very frustrating as a reader to have the imagery already painted out for you. From then on you will picture the illustrator's renderings instead of the picture in your mind's eye.
Bringing this blog-as-a-book notion forward struck me as radical, but in hindsight maybe not. In the early days of blogging many authors had their blogs published as books with a little reworking.
Somehow I wanted to tie this weeks post into week six's reading by Piper. Piper advances a metaphor and thesis in one when he opens his chapter with the phrase "The page is the atom of the book." I found as I read that I kept coming back to this comparison between atom and page. However, I was not returning to it to celebrate it, but rather to ponder it, and in a way get hung up on it. My mind rolled the declaration into a question, "How is an atom like a page?" Yet still I got nowhere. Is a book a molecule then? And a collection of books, or a library, what is that? If Piper only meant to say that a page is a small part of something bigger, then why confuse me with the atom metaphor. Is a page more like an atom than a book is like a blog?

The Advantages and Limitations of a Non-Standardized E-Book: TheDisney "Animated" App

This week's blogging question has really caused me to think about the things I love and the things that make me frustrated about the e-book platform, and what it might mean for the future of the book. Again, my example is going to be the Disney Animated app, because it is the e-book I've most recently used and because I think it opens up some interesting discussion points for both the sophistication of the e-book and the drawbacks of the e-book.

As I've mentioned before on this blog, I think that the e-book's capacity for intermediality makes it an ideal format for certain types of text. For this book, which is essentially a textbook about the past, present, and future of Disney animation, the interactive components of this app (including videos, 3D models, pictures, and platforms for experimenting with animation) make it an infinitely more useful resource than a print book alone could ever offer. Not only does the app incorporate images and videos to illustrate the techniques it is talking about, but it allows the reader to have complete control over using them: you can zoom in and out on any aspect of the gorgeous high resolution photos of background (fig. 1-3) and character designs (fig. 4-6) to really get a sense of how intricate they are; you can play a video clip frame by frame (fig. 7) to really understand how the animation works and can skip between frames as you wish; you can practice animating facial expressions with the "Mood Shifter" (fig. 8) that shows how facial animation works at a later stage in the game; you can even animate and share your own animation sequences with an interactive model using a simplified version of the animation software used by Disney (fig. 9).

Figure 1 The following three images from the app illustrate the level of detail Disney puts in to their scenery design and animation. The first is a panorama of the famous forest background from Disney's Sleeping Beauty. If you zoom in on the app, you can see how detailed the image is, as seen in images 2 and 3, which focus on the bush by the tree just to the right of centre on the first image.

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4 These next three images are meant to represent the 3D model of Pocahontas that Disney animators used to ensure that the character they were animating was on model, no matter which angle they were drawing her from. On the app, you can actually rotate the model 360 degrees so that you get a sense of what the model would have looked like and how the model could have been used.

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7 In the app you can drag your cursor to any of the frames in this short video, so that you can slow it down and re-play it to "spend some time with this example" to understand "the techniques...being used here" as the caption in this image suggest. It also auto-plays the video the first time, so that you can see the whole thing in motion.

Figure 8 By moving the yellow cross symbol to different locations on the diagram, you can change different aspects of the horse from Tangled, Maximus' face to try to emulate different emotions.

Figure 9 By moving any of the many nodes that make up Vanellope's body, you can create your own animated sequences. Here Vanellope is waving. If you look at the top right corner, you can also see the "Share" button that allows you to share the animation you create through various social networks.

The app also includes an interesting example of how e-books can make the allusiveness of a text more readily apparent. When the app introduces "The 12 principles of animation" (which come from an earlier Disney text called The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation written by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson and first published in 1980), the app then reproduces the entire chapter in the app (fig. 10-11). Of course, because the app takes advantage of its digital medium it updates all of the examples from the earlier text from still images to short animated films, making the app even more useful (fig. 12-13).

Figure 10 The 12 principles of animation picture here. Caption: If you click on the animated Mickey on the lower right corner of this image (in the app) it will take you to the app's reproduction of "The 12 Principles of Animation" chapter from The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation.

Figure 11 One of the pages from The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. This page is about two of the 12 principles: Squash and Stretch.

Figure 12 Clicking on one of the inlaid images on the page in the app will give you a preview of the video that you can play with. In this case, the Mickey Mouse image shows how breathing is animated.

Figure 13 Like the other videos in the app, you can search this one frame by frame to really get a sense of how the animation works. All you have to do is double tap Mickey from the first page.

The app also allows the reader to pick different entry points by making each one of its "chapters" a starting point on the home page(fig. 14).

Figure 14 The homepage for the Disney Animated app. You can scroll through the chapters by swiping left and right (in the app), then click on one to open it. The homepage also gives automatic access to some of its interactive elements and to its embedded illustrations from this page.

Unfortunately, this is where I started encountering aspects of this e-book that paper books and other e-book formats that more closely resemble a standard paper book that make it less useful than a paper book. Because I have to enter the book through one of the chapters, I can't easily "flip" to the exact page I am looking for. Because I don't have the ability to search the app using the "it was about this far up on the page about this far into the book" type method it made it frustrating to try to easily return to passages I wanted to. Some other e-book formats (like those used on the Kindle and the Kobo), try to alleviate this disparateness between books and e-books by adding a search function. This app does not.

In fact, some of the other closer to paper text functions (like highlighting and note-taking) that some e-book formats try to incorporate in their e-books don't exist in this app - which for someone who was using this app as a source for a paper was incredibly frustrating. I had to keep notes on a separate sheet of paper, and make sure that I had copied the information for the citation correctly (which, as I talked about in my last blog post, also turned out to be difficult in itself). In my own opinion, these are features that ought to be standardized in the creation of e-books to mimic an aspect of the paper book that worked really well (even if it seems like a non-essential part of the paper book).

Other aspects of this e-book that made it more frustrating to read than a paper book include its unskippable intro screen (a feature which it seems to have inherited from the DVD that is generally unpopular on the DVD format) and the inability to turn off sound until after you've entered the app (if you choose to allow it to keep playing, the book will play instrumental snippets of Disney songs the entire time you're reading it). While I think that the sound is important when you're watching the videos, and that it adds a nice nostalgic touch when images from a film are accompanied by songs from the same film, it makes using the app in a public place (or the library) without headphones a daunting challenge (It even plays if your iPad is otherwise muted!).

Overall, I think that the good far outweighs the bad for this app, since most of my grievances with the difference between paper page representation and digital page representation are minor annoyances.

How do we cite an app?

In a paper I wrote recently for Sara Grimes' Remix Culture course - in which I made the argument that we need to redefine authorship as a collaborative process if we can ever hope to justify the remix authors as authors - I ran into the peculiar problem of trying to cite an e-book in the form of an iPad app. The source was Disney's "Animated" app [I was trying to use the "legitimized" collaborative process of making an animated musical as a metaphor for the "illegitimate" collaborative remix practice], which (as I have already described briefly) is an interactive coffee table book in which Disney animators explain the past, present, and future of the Disney animation process using examples from Disney movies from past to present.

My major difficulty with citing this app was that there are no standards for how to describe things like a sketch or the four frames of a hand-drawn cartoon that make up a video illustrating a specific movement that exist within (or at least along side) the text of an e-book. I feel like it is incredibly important to credit the animators that created these sketches and short films (as does Disney, who add a caption with this information under each of these elements) that were not created for this app, but which have never been published elsewhere, so just citing the app and adding a general entry for the app into my Works Cited doesn't cut it for me when it comes to citation. Unfortunately, this is the only standard way to cite these things if you are following MLA or APA citation standards. I can't help but feel that new, more inclusive standards need to be created in order to more accurately credit content creators.

How could we represent collaborative authorship more accurately in these formats? Citation style guides will certainly have to adapt as these sorts of "futures of the book" continue to be published. I think it will come down to trying to credit individual collaborators first, and then describing the source in which the person making the citation found the content first.

Question #5 - Final Assignment

For this weeks blog question I would like to discuss how Andrew Steeve’s lecture got me to start thinking about topics for my final essay. I just want to start off by saying how inspiring and informative I thought Andrews talk was. Although I am not in the book history stream here at the  iSchool, I was fortunate enough to have book history classes available in my undergrad at YorkU. I was always particularly interested in the different ways books have been looked upon throughout history and instead of looking specifically at the history of books, for this assignment I thought it might be interesting to examine how the digital environment has altered the traditional role of the paper based book.
I found it interesting when Andrew discussed the issue of there being an increase in accessibility, but readability has unfortunately decreased. Because of technology our ability to sit and read has been altered.  I also found it interesting when someone from class commented about books being sold at farmers markets and really, whether or not it could be successful. It got me thinking about peoples appreciation for well made local products. As the book as an object continues to become more obsolete, it may be interesting to look into ways people are actively going against, or in the least, trying to offer alternatives to the generic digital versions of books. Sort of in the same way as when there was a yearning for nostalgic physical types of photography after the boom of digital cameras and phone cameras. Even though the technology changed photography to be much more accessible, it still has not completely abolished the original form of photos. There are still people willing to fight to keep it alive, for example, The Impossible Project (a photography collective in New York) saved the last Polaroid production plant and started to produce new film thus, saving analog instant photography from extinction. What I’m thinking for my final paper is maybe looking into the ways in which independent publishing houses, used book stores, and artists are doing similar things to save the book as an object from becoming extinct. 

Curating for local reading interests

I have been thinking a lot about the great talk that Andrew Steeves gave last week, even going so far as to discuss it with colleagues not enrolled in our class. One of the things Andrew talked about that I had not considered was the relationship of the curated local bookstore to the community in which it resides. The really cool relationship he described is certainly something I had experienced living in Guelph, Ontario and occasionally buying books at The Bookshelf. The staff there could take my interests and funnel them into great reads that were often off the beaten path. Of course I understand now that they were practicing the much studied art of readers advisory. I liked the way Andrew was able to put this relationship in a very Ranganathanesque way, "every reader his or her book."
With the decline of the local bookstore as a business, where does this curated selection reside? I took this question to a colleague who felt that bloggers, librarians, and other apostles of culture could fill the shoes of these bookstore owners. In some ways I agree. With the rise of Print On Demand (POD) services and our access to word processors, I really think that libraries should get into the self publishing business for local authors. Communities are bursting with local interest stories of cultural and historical importance that no publisher would ever touch. Will the books circulate? I can't say, but remember what Andrew was arguing. He relished the notion that a bookstore might wait six months for a book of poetry to find just the right owner.
This is a call to librarians and other cultural and heritage professionals to become deeply involved members of their communities. We need to ensure that as local bookstores lose out to Amazon.com that the curation of important work is not lost, and that our libraries are not just dustier versions of Chapters.

Question 5- The Encoding Challenge Result

For this week’s blogging question I would like to relate the experience I had with the last assignment. Although many people in the class may be tired of XML, I rather enjoyed the Encoding Challenge. It became both fulfilling and engaging, since the task was not overly simple and required true decision making. Additionally, it truly aided in understanding the premise of markup language and was a valuable hands-on task. Above all, the Encoding challenge would be a project that I would recommend and should continue as a staple for this class.

With its cluster of texts and strange filters of colour, an XML code may appear to be disinteresting or monotonous to an outside observer. However, plugging away the information and transforming an image into our own interpretation surprisingly became entertaining. New ideas kept arising and better formats and strategies continuously moulded the work into a well devised product. With the entire code before us, through all the decisions we made, and the numerous brightly coloured tags, there was a sense of accomplishment. We had created something that had likely never been attempted and it was the result of great teamwork and collaboration.  

Conversing with me peers throughout the develop of our schema and code, it became apparent that no one else would understand our dialogue. This aspect became rather amusing and humorous, at least to myself; we had created a close connection to our work and had formed a particular language. Certain areas of the piece were being referred to in abbreviations, standard TEI jargon was being employed, and by the end we had a new perspective on our example that we chose to encode. Every minute detail of that comic panel had been examined and we may now realize the complex relations of all the parts, which would not be obvious from a first glance. In a way, the XML encoding orders and reduces the information into a comprehensive form, what was once a fairly chaotic graph of spurting thoughts has become a structured linear article. As a whole, one may now appreciate the advantage of XML analysis; it focuses the participant to survey and highlight every significant feature of a text.

Tablets and Learning in Museums

In class last week I was very interested in Andrew’s discussion of the ways through which the physiology of books can aid or detract from the learning process. He mentioned that there is a difference between learning when it is done through the medium of a physical book, versus through an online text. He seemed to be against using tablets and eReaders for learning because the medium, especially the light emitted from the screen, is not conductive to learning.

I am very interested in whether tablets are an effective way through which to disseminate information in an exhibit, and if they support learning in museums. The use of new technology, like tablets, in museums is a bit of a hot topic right now within the professional and academic museum communities. Most of the discussion revolves around how to use new technology to enhance the learning, and overall experience, of visitors within a museum/exhibit.

Andrew’s talk has made me interested in whether or not there is any research that discusses how the use of tablets within museum exhibits might detract from the visitors’ experience and learning.  How do tablet screens affect learning and memory in museums? This might be an interesting topic to research for my final paper!

Book-Game Continuum

This week I decided to comment on Andrew Steeves' lecture. Much of what he discussed really resonated with me, and though he didn't have much to say about publishing of children's books, he did say something that stuck in my mind: something about how children's books get more and more interactive features added to them, and become more and more like games.

Andrew's comment reminded me of the Alice in Wonderland iPad app that everyone (including myself) was so in awe of. Here is a video of some guy showing off the app on Oprah:

As you can see, the e-book (or app) goes for a kind of a vintage manuscript feel, using yellowed-paper background, and incorporating well-known illustrations by John Tenniel. But, unlike the stationary images of the book, the app allows users to shift the images around - by tilting your iPad you can cause the king's crown to tumble, or make the White Rabbit's pocket watch swing, or even make Alice's neck grow longer.

Oprah exclaims that this is going to "change how kids learn". I'm not sure I'm buying that... As a teacher, I've seen kids, and I've helped them learn. Making figures move on a screen is not going to help them understand the text any better. It is not going to reveal hidden aspects of the story, which can only be discovered through thoughtful reading. It is not going to help kids develop creative thinking skills - in fact, I hazard that it will make it harder for them to think creatively, since everything is already there for them, motion included. I will admit that I haven't actually tried out the app, but from the videos I find on YouTube it seems that the motion interferes with the text, rather than aids it. Personally, it just looks like a fun toy to give to a five-year-old on a long car-ride.

I'm not against computer games per se, but I agree with Andrew's point completely. The distraction caused by all the extra stuff added to e-books interrupts the narrative and chops up the story. With non-fiction books, this can actually be beneficial (I'm imagining a book on dinosaurs with embedded videos and games - awesome!), but the whole point of fiction, I think, is to lose yourself in it, so that you become part of the story - a hovering observer, perhaps, or even one of the characters. And for that you need uninterrupted reading time. A dangling pocket watch in front of my face would absolutely ruin it for me.

Encoding Challenge: The third Hyperbole and a Half

Piggy-backing on Sarah and Patrick's comments about working on our encoding challenge on Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half, I'd like to talk quickly about the challenge we've had of representing the unconventional aspects of the comic. The page we've decided to work on is a complex flow chart that describes how Brosh's narrator envisions herself. The complicated relationships between the elements are not only multi-dimensional (which we've managed to solve by using the TEI rules for marking up graphs), but also range in intensity. In order to deal with describing intensity, we have had to come up with our own rules. We've used a combination of pre-existing rules for representing the numerical amounts within a tag (like the number of inputs and outputs in relation to a specific node in a graph) with some of our own invention to represent the intensity of the pointing numerically. In doing, so we've managed to represent something unconventional in a more conventional format, but I feel like we've lost the fun and spontaneity of the way that this intensity is represented within the comic.

If the point of a mark-up language is to make a universally readable representation of a text, is there a certain amount of fun and difference that has to be compromised in order to make the text machine readable? Or is that something that we can add back in using a variety of different interpretive tags of our own invention?

Encoding Challenge

Our group (Polina, Brad, Sally, myself) will be encoding two pages from this book:

I had heard of this book years ago when it was released but never got around to picking up a copy to read, so I was happy to see Polina mention it on the blog and have the chance to look at the text more closely. The most challenging aspect of encoding this book I am finding is the layout. The pages throughout the book include extensive marginalia, images, captions, maps etc.

The challenge here is how to decide on what our XML is trying to do with this text? Both pages include various different images and what we are trying to do is decide on how to incorporate these images into the code to emphasis their importance and how essential they are to understanding the text.

We began as a group as deciding what factors were the most important to tag, such as, <p>, <hi>, <emph>, <name>, etc. We also discussed what aspects of the layout could/should be eliminated such as page numbers. We also noted aspects we thought were interesting and essential to including somehow within the code, for example the color of the map on the first page being sepia toned, whereas every other images are simply black and white.

Now I am looking specifically looking at this image :

By going through the TEI elements I have begun to break down the image into code and  have decided to start by breaking it down from <figure> as a whole, to <header> “The McAwesome Trident of Desire>, to <figDesc> to describe the three images. As I continue working on the images through the rest of the week I am hopeful that I will successfully decipher what parts of these images are essential in illustrating what our XML perspective is.

Encoding Challenge: The Collected Works of T.S. Spivet

Our group is working on encoding two pages from Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet.  I was familiar with the book when it first came out as being one that experiments with form: there is a lot of marginalia, maps, images, and other non-traditional forms.  All of these elements are present on the two pages we’ve chosen to encode, and all of them present their own encoding challenges. With such different formal elements, we’ve had to consider how important the form of a particular element is to the function. Even some fairly basic and traditional formal elements, such as the use of italics, presented problems for us. We were unsure of whether or not the italics always suggested the same thing (internal thought) in each instance, or whether they were meant to convey different things (an invocation in one instance and emphasis in another). We also had to discuss whether or not to tag these instances of italics separately if they were intact meant to convey different meanings.

The McAwesome Trident of Desire -- one of the images we are encoding.
Taken from 39 Counties blog.

There are also four separate images on the two pages we have chosen to encode. One of the first conversations we had to have as a group was about the intended purpose of these images, their relationship with the text, and how the reader is expected to read them. We decided that the final image was  integral to the text and was meant to be read as text, whereas two of the other images should be considered marginalia or something like a gloss. The role these images play within the text influenced the way we decided to treat them while coding.

For me, reading has always been a fairly intuitive act, but this assignment has challenged how I approach a text—it’s definitely an activity that I wish had been assigned during my undergrad as an English student.

Tagging is a Complex Mistress

I've given a little bit of thought to the tagging schema of Arrian's The Campaign of Alexander. My first instinct was to begin tagging from left to right - I need to start somewhere, after all. And the archives and record management stream has beaten respect for original order into my brain so much over the last few months that I've started applying it to places in my life outside an archival setting. With this specific image, that would mean starting with the page title printed farthest on the left: "Battle is joined on Alexander's right". That would be followed by the section title: "Gaugamela", then "Autumn 331", then "Book Three". The second page in the image, from left to right, would be: "Book Three", then "Autumn 331", then "Gaugamela", then "Darius sends out his chariots".  The inconsistencies are self evident. The hierarchy of titles is unclear.   

The method of tagging titles as they fall on the page may work if these two pages were not considered part of a larger volume. But it's clear that method will not suffice for a number of reasons.  As you can see, there are four titles (and I use that term loosely) on each page. Only the titles in the green circles describe different content. It's impractical to repeat the yellow, red, and blue tags for every page. It also doesn't give any accurate context as to which title is the largest section; is "Autumn 331[AD]" larger than "Book Three"? In this case, not likely, but who is to say for sure without access to the physical book? The tagging schema will have to be broken down from it's largest parts to its smallest - an imposed hierarchy. Using the colour scheme below, that would be yellow, red, blue, then green. "Book Three" changes the less frequently than the other sections. The green circle's title changes, presumably, with each page. Consequently, the page layout will be lost in XML-translation, but the content will remain and users will be able to figure out what section of Arrian's text they are reading.       

There is another issue at hand with tagging this image. This issue may not be quite as easily solvable as the title problem.  The issue at hand is the descriptive notes in the margins.  In the red circles,  "Autumn 331" is used as one of the sub-titles at the top of the page and it is used again as sub-title and contextual element for the note in the margin.  In that note on the right side of the image, there is an overlapping blue and red circle that merges "Gaugamela" and "Autumn 331" as part of the same description.  Can these two descriptive elements become one tag? Further scrutiny of the text will help decide if tagging these names again as a contextual element would be redundant.  One option is to omit tagging these sections and leave it as regular content. Or in the interest of creating a user-friendly search aid, a distinction will need to be made between the sub-title "Autumn 331" and the contextual element "Autumn 331".  

Food for thought. 

Emily Dickinson Collection

A few weeks ago, when we were discussing Shakespeare's sonnets and the way editors chose to represent or encode his work by altering or omitting words, it made me think of Emily Dickinson, specifically how early editors of her work made the decision to add 'titles' to her work (perhaps for readership, book formatting, or both) as a large body of Emily's original manuscripts did not contain them.

One of the challenges of representing poetry in editing either for publication or TEI, is the decision to make changes to a text. Four years after Emily's death, Loomis Todd, along with Thomas Wentworth Higginson co-edited the Poems of Emily Dickinson for publication in 1890. "The two editors made changes to the poems, regularizing punctation, adding occasional titles, and sometimes altering words to improve rhyme or sense..."(according to Emily Dickinson Museum: The Posthumous Discovery of Dickinson's Poems).  

When I first discovered Emily's poetry as an undergraduate, they contained their 'titles.' At first, I didn't think anything of it, only that I assumed it was natural to 'name' or 'title' your work. When I learned that the 'titles' were added in.

This made me wonder a great deal about Emily's intent and the stylistic expressions for her own poetry and how she wanted them to be represented. Changing a line, or adding a 'title' ultimately influences the reader's ideas about a poem's content, images, or the poet's intended meaning.

 Recently, I came across The Amherst College (where Emily was a student) digitization project of the  Emily Dickinson Collection. It has some wonderful examples of her letters, poems, and even recipes (for doughnuts!) written on envelopes, and fragments of paper.

One of the things I like about the digital Emily Dickinson Collection is that, in the case of her poetry manuscripts, the 'title' of the manuscript is the first line of the poem.

There are also some experimental aspects of the poems as well in format. One poem written on an envelope, "how hope builds a house…" interestingly uses the shape of the envelope to represent the frame a house, with the lines 'the way' at the tip of the envelope, or roof:

The way hope builds his house. Emily Dickinson Collection.

This is an example of some of the interesting, playful ways Emily experiments with the appearance of her poem, both in the physical form and layout of the lines in a way that I have never seen represented in any modern collections of her writing.

Encoding Challenge Example- Hyperbole and a Half

The encoding challenge example I wish to discuss is Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half, more specifically the page our group decided upon. As previously noted, this book is a comedic piece of literature that uses a variety of images and texts together to tell a story. Within the book, “unfortunate situations, flawed coping mechanisms, mayhem, and other things that happened” in Allie Brosh’s life are presented. The contents are full of funny tales that are quite entertaining.  

The page we chose reveals a rather large and complicated thought-process of the central character. A number of thought clouds and speech bubbles are jumbled in an intricate web of ideas. Not only is the entire piece full of information, but also a great use of colour and diverse fonts set the tone and concept. Emphasis is given on certain sections within the chart due to these contrasting elements. For this assignment, the particular challenge will be to decide how we might convey the step-by-step development of the author’s ideas.

Although we have not quite started to encode the image, a few considerations have been presented. We discussed what elements would be essential to represent, which areas we would need to omit, and how we would show the relationship between the different speech bubbles. Above all, the most pressing concern has been on how we might demonstrate the interconnectedness of the entire piece. A number of arrows point between related thoughts and branch out without any precise order. Sometimes even more arrows are drawn to emphasize the importance of a sub-thought. There is always the question whether to make a distinction based on the stress through arrows or not. We might be able to create a tag to signify the use of arrows, yet nothing is finalized for the XML code. Certainly, several nested hierarchies will be beneficial and likely will be utilized; however, it is still unclear whether we will take the entire piece as one block, with a top and bottom, or break it into separate sections with their own ‘headings’.

Regardless of our final decisions, the project shall be an entertaining and interesting endeavour. The subject of comedy and the significance of context, through both text and image, will be a challenge to represent effectively. We look forward to the result and hopefully we are successful.

#4 and Arrian

I am part of the group that will be encoding a portion of this edition of Arrian's The Campaigns of Alexander.  As you can see by the image that Caleb provided in his post, there is a lot of text on the page in addition to the main narrative history.  These include footnotes, marginalia, and captions for images.  We want to make sure that we include all of this information along with the text as we encode. 

One of the interesting features that we noticed was that each footnote is unique.  A lot of books will start numbering their notes for the first chapter at 1 and proceed numerically until they reach a new chapter, at which point they will start at one again.  This book tells you exactly where each foot note belongs.  For example, one of the footnotes on our selected portion is designated 3.13.4a.  Reading it from left to right it tells you it is from book 3, chapter 13, section 4, first note.  This is incredibly detailed metadata, and we haven't even looked at the actual contents of the footnote. 

While the footnotes provide detailed information about the text, the marginalia group the sections and provide short summaries.  It is a great navigational tool that allows the reader to skim through the book to find precisely what they're looking for.  While this is an incredible feature, the question as always is how we will reflect this in our code.

A lol Worthy Encoding Challenge

On the road to deciding which type of humorous text we would encode, Jeremy suggested we try Bo Burnham’s funny poetry book “Egghead: Or, You Can't Survive on Ideas Alone.” It is supposedly a very funny book that incorporates images and humor into poetry. Sadly, none of us could find a copy for our decision meeting last week, and we ended up deciding to use Allie Brosh’s giggle inducing book “Hyperbole and a Half.” The book is based on her website which includes blog style web comics, please go look it up, you will not regret it but you will lose an hour of your life.

“Hyperbole and a Half” is an exciting encoding challenge because it has various levels of descriptive hierarchy within the text as well as complex comics. The text is not nearly as funny without reference to the comics and the same can be said for the comics (As seen below, funny alone, but rib cracking hilarious when read in context).

Or this!

Additional information is also included in the comics that augment the humor level of the stories.

The first problem we encountered in our efforts to encode a sample of “Hyperbole and a Half”, was deciding which type of TEI text body guideline to use. The book really does not fit neatly into any of the available categories, but while re-reading the class blog we stumbled upon Comic Book Markup Language (CBML).  CBML is “an XML vocabulary for encoding multiform documents that are variously called comics, comic books, and “graphic novels” as well as other documents that integrate comics content or that share formal features with comics content” (Comic Book Markup Language, 2012). So far it fits perfectly with our encoding project!

Another reason Allie Brosh’s book is such an interesting challenge is the fact that it began as a web comic which employs HTML. Next it was transferred into a physical format with additional comics. Now we are attempting to re-digitize the text through TEI based CBML. Round and round we go! It will be interesting to compare the HTML code to our finished encoding project.

Seriously, please go to her web page!

Works Cited:

Comic Book Markup Language. 2012. “What is CBML?” Last Modified May 17, 2012.          http://dcl.slis.indiana.edu/cbml/

All images were taken from;

Allie Brosh. 2013. “Hyperboyle and a Half.” Accessed February 12, 2014.                 http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.ca/2010/02/boyfriend-doesnt-have-ebola-probably.html

(Not) Encoding "The Very Quiet Cricket" by Eric Carle

 

I'm sure by now you all know I'm passionate about kids. No wonder, then, that I thought of encoding a children's book. Not knowing much about encoding, I thought it would be fun to see what I can do about books with sounds. A beautiful example of such a book is "The Quiet Cricket" by Eric Carle.
There aren't any images that I can post except the one on the right, but it gives you an idea as to the size of the book, the amount of text, and the type of illustrations.
Here is a video of someone reading the book out loud. Pay special attention to 3:11, where you hear the cricket sound. It really is a marvelous book, and kids absolutely adore it, even when they are old and jaded.

And now, to the encoding. Some things would have been pretty straight forward: maybe tagging the different characters, their salutations ("Good morning!", "Hi!", "Good evening"), and the repetitive cricket's part. Images would be a challenge, of course, since XML is all about text, while in children's books the images play just as important a role, if not more important. For now, all I can see that can be done with images is simply display them alongside the text (using a url), and/or describe them, if that is seen as valuable. But I suppose this is the big question: why is it valuable? I could see the need for a description when encoding something like the King James Bible we looked at, where the image is very textual (political, in fact). But what is the use of describing the position of the praying mantis' arms? Or the colours of the dots on the luna moth's wings? They need to be seen, not read about, so had I tried encoding the book, I wouldn't have described the pictures.

Finally, the sound. It comes as a surprise at the very end, because the cricket was silent beforehand, but now it can "chirp". So, somehow, this sound needs to come at the reader/viewer all of a sudden, without having to click on a link. True, in the paper-based book the reader has to flip a page in order to hear the sound, but flipping a page is simply what one does when reading a book, and so the motion is not out of the ordinary, whereas clicking on a link is definitely a "purposeful" action, if you know what I mean. How to you create surprise using code? And how do you encode sound? If, like with images, it's descriptive, then I see no reason to describe it. As I said above, it should be heard, not read.

I'm glad I decided not to try to encode such a book. I think it would have been less than fruitful, and very frustrating. Perhaps some books simply aren't meant to be encoded? 

Encoding Challenge Example, The Campaigns of Alexander

I am part of the group that will be encoding a bit of this book:

And more specifically, this part of the book:

As you can see there is lots of cool stuff on the page just based on the layout. However, I am particularly fascinated by the depth behind every name mentioned in a paragraph. Each of the names written down on these pages has an entire history to it. I think descriptively tagging these individuals and places, and according them a tag that allows the text to be searched or navigated by name would make for an powerful XML book. One could later  count descriptive tags to count names and the distances of names from each other. Similar to the way journal impact factor is based in citation analysis, scholars could run metrics on XML tags.
At the same time, part of me gets pretty worried about descriptively tagging each name, precisely because each name has such a long history. I know that some times the challenges that excite our passions can also be our undoing.
I also want to make a tie-in with our readings on the Page this week. I really like that most of us came into the Encoding Challenge thinking we would transcribe a whole book or chapter, but now almost all of us are focused deeper, all the way down to the page. And we get to ask ourselves, should my book as XML have any page layout resemblance to the paper book? Or is rejecting the boundary, even the idea, of the page an essential question to wade through?