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Imagine a Google Earth-like opportunity to move between the “street view” of a close reading environment through aerial views of the inferences, influences, and dynamic constructions that emerge from the routes that grow up around a text, to satellite views of larger, constellated fields of contextual data. What kinds of scholarship and scholarly communication would such an environment enable? How would the inclusion of mapping and terraforming tools (that parallel the functions demonstrated in a game like Minecraft, or within Outerra’s impressive planetary mapping demo and sandbox prototype) encourage further occupation and influence? The Modelling and Prototyping group at INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) is working to engage with such possibility spaces in an effort to address these questions.

This essay reviews the attempts of the Blake Archive to come to terms with interface, but argues – implicitly – by inventing a new visualization system and theorizing its difference that opportunities for thinking are lost when archives emulate print practices in digital editions.

There is a lingering irony in the proliferation of academic interest in and acceptance of graphic narratives as “serious” story spaces since Art Spiegelman refigured the Holocaust as an illustrated beast fable. The translation of historical trauma into a storyboard and people into personified animals has been perceived as a radical and refreshing move – yet the distancing function of this multiply-mediating medium has been eclipsed by its novelty as a vehicle for historical confrontation and remediation. The extent of Spiegelman’s innovation is that he uses the accessible and familiar form of the comic book, which appeals to a wide-ranging readership, to deliver a focused interrogation of historical circumstances (that are difficult to comprehend) from a personal perspective that is neither completely abstract nor partial. However “raw” such a juxtaposition and re-presentation seems, though, Spiegelman’s tragic comic is not all that innovative in its combination of pre-existing literary narrative customs and formal comic book conventions. Many other creative efforts, such as playful illuminations in the margins of medieval manuscripts, religious emblems, the work of William Blake, and the political cartoons of James Gilray, among others, have imaginatively combined the sister arts of poetry/words and painting/images for “serious” narrative purposes well before Spiegelman’s Maus. While Maus is certainly a significant point in the history of graphic narrative representation, especially given its role as a catalyst for increased academic attention to this form, little overall attention has been given to the mediating functions of this and other examples of composite art in relation to their re-presented human subjects (an issue that Maus certainly foregrounds). “Wordsworth,” an unconventional and lesser-known graphic “short story” involving a creative collaboration between writer Neil Gaiman and artist Dave McKean, highlights the functional ability of words and images to simultaneously inform and deform the human body and the human being through self-reflexive elements of form and content. The ethical significance of this function is crucial in a market dominated by historical and autobiographical graphic narratives such as Epileptic, by David B., Persepolis 1 & 2, by Marjane Satrape, Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Chester Brown’s biography of Louis Riel. The particular meeting and mingling of the sister arts in “Wordsworth” offers a grotesque caution regarding the performative capability of multiply mediated representations. Its fictional status allows its creators to experimentally illustrate the effects of representative multiplicity in graphic narratives and interrogate the functional effects of the sister arts on the human condition without disfiguring or harming a historical subject.

Even though large aggregations of humanities data are emerging through the efforts of significant federations, the larger the collection, the more difficult it is for large-scale standards to effectively account for and relate the complex variety of data objects and their characteristics. How can we simultaneously embrace this complexity with the help of the computer and achieve interoperability while still retaining the interpretative flexibility that is the heart of meaningful humanities work? Additionally, what scale is the optimal viewpoint through which we can do humanities-related work on such large data sets? At what point do we lose a humanist sensibility when working with big data, and how do we take advantage of computing technology to pluralize perspective, confront complexity, avoid reductiveness and preserve meaning as we interpret meaningful subsets of big data collections? NewRadial— an INKE prototype—addresses these questions by enabling users to connect and explore humanities databases across plural scales of engagement without imposing a universal metadata standard. Its web-based environment visually displays the objects of humanities databases in a manner that encourages browsing, searching, collecting, organizing, connecting and annotating, modelling a way to bring different standards and ontological perspectives together without negating their differences or requiring conformity to a reductive or limiting overall system. Même si de grands regroupements de données de sciences humaines voient le jour grâce aux efforts d'importantes fédérations, plus la collection est vaste, plus il est difficile pour les normes à grande échelle de tenir compte et de dépeindre efficacement la gamme complexe des objets de données et leurs caractéristiques. Comment cela peut-il être apprécié dans toute sa complexité avec l'aide de l'ordinateur et réaliser une interopérabilité tout en maintenant la souplesse interprétative qui est au cœur même du travail significatif des sciences humaines. De plus, quelle est l'ampleur du point de vue optimal par lequel le travail relié aux sciences humaines peut être accompli selon un tel vaste ensemble de données? À quel moment peut-on perdre la sensibilité humaniste en travaillant avec de larges données, et comment tirer parti de la technologie informatique pour pluraliser la perspective, confronter la complexité, éviter le caractère minimaliste et préserver le sens à mesure que l'on interprète les sous-ensembles significatifs des grandes collections de données? NewRadial— un prototype de INKE—répond à ces questions en permettant aux utilisateurs de relier et d'explorer les bases de données de sciences humaines à travers une pluralité d'échelles d'engagement sans imposer une norme universelle de métadonnées. Son environnement internet affiche visuellement les objets des bases de données de sciences humaines de façon à encourager la navigation, la recherche, la collecte, l'organisation, la connexion et l'annotation, en servant de modèle pour démontrer un moyen de rassembler différentes normes et perspectives ontologiques, sans remettre en question leurs différences ni exiger la conformité à un système global réducteur ou contraignant.

This article promotes a theoretical evolution in the conceptualisation and operation of digital literary archives via NewRadial, a prototype archive application that models the following distinction: Whereas a digital edition continues to function as a primary source, the root of a secondary discourse field much like its print-based predecessor, the digital archive should be reconceived as a broader, active, dynamic public record, an information commons that substantiates a foundational collection of primary texts with a continuous aggregation of critical contexts and conversations that grow from that foundation.

This paper offers a unique model for collaborative digital scholarly edition environments that features functions and possibilities associated with game-related play, challenge, achievement, and narrativity. These proposed environments can and should encourage two types of technical education simultaneously: the use of the scholarly edition software, and an increasing mastery of scholarly editing practice. Further, successful models of collaboration found in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games can be effectively used to facilitate the operation of collaborative, dynamic editing environments, and achievement "badges" along with other ways of acknowledging user contributions are effective ways to validate the gaming "levels" and "achievements" that various contributors have reached within the editing environment. Functionally incorporating these recognizable game elements into the development of digital scholarly editions generates an apprenticeship space that continually demands a performative understanding of the kinds of work that go into scholarly editing, encourages collaborative edition development, and clearly establishes who exactly has accomplished that work (and to which level).

Visual art and written text have been described as historical sisters, linguistic twins and warlike enemies. These attempts to exclusively define the capabilities of each medium are inherently limited, contradictory and inaccurate. A better understanding of their individual capability and cooperative possibility can be achieved by examining the ways in which each functions in relation to the other on the composite page. William Blake's designs provide an excellent arena in which the functional interaction between the arts can be observed. Blake's visual additions to the poetry of Thomas Gray, Robert Blair and Edward Young demonstrate that the visual image is capable of interrupting the stability of exclusive textual meaning. However, this does not undermine the capability of either medium to assert meaningful possibility. Rather, the excess of Blake's visual imagery amidst another's poetic page produces a pluralisation of media and representative potential that avoids the extremes of hierarchical definition and all-inclusive meaninglessness. In contrast, Blake's own composites feature visual art and textual expression that both contribute to an overall evasion of definitive interpretation. However, their unpredictable interrelations and inconsistencies amplify and distort one another on the composite page, sustaining a relationship that is neither exclusively harmonic nor discordant. Thus, the non-synthetic "marriage" of contrary states that provides the subject matter of the Songs and the Marriage is also an accurate model for the overall relationship between visual art and text in Blake's designs. A consideration of historical context reveals the contradictory currents that direct and antagonise Blake's designs and suggests that the perception of the relationship between the "Sister Arts" often depends on such temporal conditions. While acknowledging the limitations imposed by historical circumstance, this study also recognises that late eighteenth-century uncertainties encourage innovative reconceptualisations of composite interaction. In both form and content, Blake's designs contain yet contend with a variety of perspectives, and are invaluable examples of the individual and interactive plenitude that visual art and text are capable of. Overall, Blake's work highlights the unique role that the multi-media space plays in creative and critical efforts to understand the functional capability of each representative medium.

INKE’s Modelling and Prototyping Team is currently motivated by the following research questions: How do we model and enable context within the electronic scholarly edition? And how do we engage knowledge-building communities and capture process, dialogue, and connections in and around the electronic scholarly edition? NewRadial is a prototype scholarly edition environment developed to address such queries. It argues for the unification of primary texts, secondary scholarship, and related knowledge communities, and re-presents the digital scholarly edition as a social edition — an open work and shared space where users collaboratively explore, sort, group, annotate, and contribute to secondary scholarship creation.

Feminist War Games? explores the critical intersections and collisions between feminist values and perceptions of war, by asking whether feminist values can be asserted as interventional approaches to the design, play, and analysis of games that focus on armed conflict and economies of violence. Focusing on the ways that games, both digital and table-top, can function as narratives, arguments, methods, and instruments of research, the volume demonstrates the impact of computing technologies on our perceptions, ideologies, and actions. Exploring the compatibility between feminist values and systems of war through games is a unique way to pose destabilizing questions, solutions, and approaches; to prototype alternative narratives; and to challenge current idealizations and assumptions. Positing that feminist values can be asserted as a critical method of design, as an ideological design influence, and as a lens that determines how designers and players interact with and within arenas of war, the book addresses the persistence and brutality of war and issues surrounding violence in games, whilst also considering the place and purpose of video games in our cultural moment.

In 2012-2013 a team led by Ray Siemens at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL), University of Victoria, in collaboration with Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE), developed three annotated bibliographies under the rubric of social knowledge creation. The items for the bibliographies were gathered and annotated by members of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) to form this tripartite document as a resource for students and researchers involved in the iNKE team and well beyond, iincluding at digital humanities seminars in Bern (June 2013) and Leipzig (July 2013).

This is a review of brat Rapid Annotation Tool, Early Modern Digital Review, Vol 2 No 2 (2019)

Academic institutions are starting to recognize the growing public interest in digital humanities research, and there is an increasing demand from students for formal training in its methods. Despite the pressure on practitioners to develop innovative courses, scholarship in this area has tended to focus on research methods, theories and results rather than critical pedagogy and the actual practice of teaching. The essays in this collection offer a timely intervention in digital humanities scholarship, bringing together established and emerging scholars from a variety of humanities disciplines across the world. The first section offers views on the practical realities of teaching digital humanities at undergraduate and graduate levels, presenting case studies and snapshots of the authors' experiences alongside models for future courses and reflections on pedagogical successes and failures. The next section proposes strategies for teaching foundational digital humanities methods across a variety of scholarly disciplines, and the book concludes with wider debates about the place of digital humanities in the academy, from the field's cultural assumptions and social obligations to its political visions. Digital Humanities pedagogy broadens the ways in which both scholars and practitioners can think about this emerging discipline, ensuring its ongoing development, vitality and long-term sustainability.

So many of [the] best-educated, best-placed people are too invested in old social models and old visions of history.Walter Russell Mead, “The Crisis of the American Intellectual” (2010)They seem to feast on technology and have an aptitude for all things digital. Don Tapscott,Grown Up Digital (2009) In this chapter, we will suggest ways of implementing digital humanities instruction for students who, as Don Tapscott’s research shows, comfortably “watch […] movies on two-inch screens,” “text in...

Between 1797 and 1799, William Blake added illustrations and poetic commentary to the poetry of Thomas Gray and presented the composite collaboration to the wife of his friend and supporter, John Flaxman. Although he was largely dependent on such friends for his commissioned work during this time,1 these were productive years for Blake overall: in 1797 he had completed 537 designs for Edward Young's ‘Night Thoughts’, 43 of which were selected to be engraved for a publication that, although financially unsuccessful, would become one of the artistic works by which Blake was chiefly known to his contemporaries. In contrast, Blake's Gray illustrations, a private commission to the Flaxmans, were nearly lost and, following their rediscovery in 1979, remained unpublished until 1922. Although critical interest in the Gray illustrations has slightly increased in the 30 years following the 1971 publication of the full-colour Trianon Press edition and of Irene Tayler's critical volume, these 116 designs are often only briefly considered or mentioned in Blake criticism and remain largely unexplored. This is unfortunate, for not only are the designs excellent examples for those who wish to explore the dynamics of Blake's temporally and methodologically staggered collaborations, but Blake's small textual additions to the Gray volume crucially hint at his own perceptions of the function of illustration.