Bleier / Bürgermeister / Klug Digital Scholary Editions as Interfaces

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-3-7481-1576-2
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 348 Seiten

Interfaces are important elements of digital scholarly editions as they allow and direct the interaction of users with the online content and they facilitate the access to and exchange of data and information. Some interfaces are created for the human user (GUI), others for machine interaction and data exchange (API). Both aspects of interfaces and their roles in digital scholarly editing were discussed at a conference in 2016 organised by the Centre for Information Modelling at the University of Graz and the Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network DiXiT. This volume includes a range of papers presented at the conference that highlight the diverse views and approaches towards interfaces in the digital scholarly editing community.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bleier, Roman

Bürgermeister, Martina

Klug, Helmut W.

Neuber, Frederike

Schneider, Gerlinde

Leseproben

What Are You Trying to Say?
The Interface as an Integral Element of Argument
Tara L. Andrews and Joris J. van Zundert Digital Scholarly Editions as Interfaces, edited by Roman Bleier, Martina Bürgermeister, Helmut W. Klug, Frederike Neuber, Gerlinde Schneider. Schriften des Instituts für Dokumentologie und Editorik 12. Books on Demand, 2018, 3–33. Abstract Graphical interfaces to digital scholarly editions are usually regarded as disconnected from the content of the edition, enough so that an argument has developed against the use of interfaces at all. We argue in this paper that the indifference and even hostility to interfaces is caused by a widespread incomprehension of their argumentative utility. In a pair of case studies of published digital editions, we conduct a detailed examination of the argument their interface makes, and compare these interface rhetorics with the stated intentions of the editors, exposing a number of contradictions between ‘word’ and ‘deed’ in the interface designs. We end by advocating for an explicit consideration of the semiotic significance of the elements of a user interface: that editors reflect on what aspect of the argument their interface expresses, and how that is adding, or perhaps subtracting, from the points they wish to make. 1 Introduction Some of the tricks of the trade involved in meeting these challenges include studying the design of infrastructure, understanding the paradoxes of infrastructure as both transparent and opaque […] (Susan Leigh Star, The Ethnography of Infrastructure, 377) In a combative paper presented at the Digital Humanities Conference 2013 in Lincoln Nebraska, Peter Robinson posited: “Your interface is everyone else’s enemy” (Desiderata). He asserted that the very thing which is meant to open up a digital text to users can, rather paradoxically and frustratingly, limit its uses. Infrastructure, as Susan Leigh Star notes, is both transparent and opaque – so long as it works as expected, it is effectively treated as invisible (transparent), but as soon as its affordances or functionality cease to match the needs of its users, those users are at a loss for how, or indeed whether, to continue using it (opaque). Interfaces are themselves a form of infrastructure, subject to the same paradoxical properties. The very purpose of an interface to a scholarly digital edition, whether it be a graphical, command-based, or programmatic interface, is to open up textual information to reader-users. Yet most of these interfaces are designed in a way that renders them neither really open nor neutral. Robinson’s primary complaint was that most interfaces of digital scholarly editions are ultimately nothing but façades behind which textual data is hidden. They proclaim ‘behold… a representation of the text’, but they offer users no further means for downloading data, for reading offline, for adding their annotations, or for interacting in any other meaningful way with the text. We argue here that the reaction against graphical interfaces for scholarly digital editions, exemplified by but not limited to Robinson’s polemics, is caused by a widespread incomprehension of the argumentative utility of interfaces. Up to now, most interface design has been carried out at the level of “unconscious incompetence” (Wikipedia Contributors, Stages) by textual scholars and the technicians they employ – it is being done, but without much explicit conscious understanding of the impact and effect of particular design decisions. Creators of digital scholarly editions regard interfaces primarily as a utilitarian means of representing the edition, and less often tend to consider the interface as a site of interaction between text and user. We have not developed an explicit understanding of how an interface argues, but such an understanding is necessary to reason about its form, function, and telos. Our purpose here is thus to explore the argumentative aspect of the interface as a first stage in the development of a more consciously-argued approach to graphical interfaces for digital scholarly editions. Our approach is one of critical reception: we will not explore here the mechanisms by which scholarly editions are produced, nor comment on the division of labour that typically goes into the creation of their interfaces. Rather, we will engage with those interfaces on their own terms, as published artefacts oriented toward a particular audience, and examine the messages we “read”. 2 The interface as medium The user interface of digital scholarly editions is often treated as a content-free and ideally interchangeable appendage to that which is actually considered the scholarly effort or work – the examination and preparation of the text and the scholarly justification for how this preparation was carried out. This is related to the conviction that the interface is, or at any rate should be, a self-contained, unambiguous, non-value-laden digital object that simply transmits a visualisation of digital textual data to a user-reader. At most, its effect is regarded as a visual permutation or aesthetic adornment of the underlying content, the textual data; its purpose is usually to present the text and edition in a way that caters to those who wish ‘simply’ to read the text, or a particular version thereof (although, as we will discover, scholarly editors often produce digital editions that seem to argue against reading). On a theoretical level, Hans Walter Gabler (47–48) has argued that the ‘autocratic strain traditionally ingrained in the editorial enterprise’ is in part to blame for this attitude towards interface work. On a more pragmatic level, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco (editing, SDE) has pointed out some of the more common flaws in digital scholarly edition interface design. The more computationally-minded in the textual scholarship community clamour, as Robinson did, for machine readable access (APIs) to these editions, in order to apply their stylometric, machine learning, or other such techniques (e.g. Piper, Underwood, Kestemont et al.). Librarians, meanwhile, call for standardization of these interfaces and the underlying data in order to promote interoperability (cf. e.g. Besser). While the Digital Humanities community engages in its skirmishes about user interface, data access, and interoperability, farther afield under the broad interdisciplinary umbrella of human computer interaction (HCI), the creation and evaluation of user interfaces has grown into an academic expertise of its own, strongly informed by disciplines as varied as graphic design, computer engineering, cognitive theory, and the social sciences (Rogers 2). Vivid debates on the importance of theory formation (e.g. Kaptelinin and Nardi), user experience (cf. Whittaker), and field studies on usability (e.g. Andreasen et al.) drive the field forward. It is thus an opportune time for us in textual scholarship to advance our understanding of interfaces based on this growing body of knowledge. Here it is useful to point to the work of Alexander Galloway, who understands an interface not as some static digital object but as the effect that results from a dynamic process of transformation or mediation (Galloway viii). As a process of mediation, an interface translates data into different states. Interface effects may be neutral, but more likely they are not, because the processes causing them are usually not impartial automata, but (in a digital context) pieces of software and code whose existence, function, and working were motivated and intentional. As such, interface effects are caused by processes that represent the delegated agency of the persons that designed them (cf. Zundert). Very little explicit awareness of this dynamic understanding of interface, of the effects caused when interfacing takes place, has crossed over to the literature on digital scholarly editions. How does the look and feel, the visual structure of information, affordances of interaction, or even the aesthetics of a given digital scholarly edition shape the experience of using it? Does the interface promote or discourage a particular mode of reading? Does it suggest or encourage a use beyond straightforward reading? This lack of awareness sits oddly with the point that has been made numerous times, beginning with Cerquiglini, that a scholarly edition is an argument about a text. If it is not particularly controversial to acknowledge that the visual appearance of a text or a picture has a marked effect upon how it is received by an audience – a point that is underscored by the design studies referred to above – then appearance is part and parcel of editorial rhetoric. We argue in this paper that, as producers of these editions, textual scholars need a much greater understanding of how their interfaces are an integral component of the argument they will convey through the act of editing their texts. Although we have some tacit knowledge of this as editors and readers, the field can likely do better at seeking out, and perhaps even producing, empirical information about how the interface – the medium – affects the argument. User interfaces are, after all, a language through which arguments are made, even when the makers of these interfaces are not conscious of the language they are using. As such, they reflect the interpretations of the materials they are supposed to represent as well as the culture, the politics, and the motives of their designers. Figure 1: La...