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Collaborative Authoring, Use and Maintenance of a Multidisciplinary Textbook

Collaborative Authoring, Use and Maintenance of a Multidisciplinary Textbook. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY. SCHOOL OF INFORMATION. Robert J. Glushko glushko@berkeley.edu @rjglushko Books in Browsers 25 October 2013. Today’s Talk. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY.

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Collaborative Authoring, Use and Maintenance of a Multidisciplinary Textbook

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  1. Collaborative Authoring, Use and Maintenance of a Multidisciplinary Textbook UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • Robert J. Glushkoglushko@berkeley.edu • @rjglushko • Books in Browsers • 25 October 2013

  2. Today’s Talk UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • The interwoven challenge(s) of multidisciplinarity and collaboration • Our crucible: The Discipline of Organizing • Implications for: • Book & ebook design • Authoring • Maintenance and evolution 2

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  4. The Concept of the “Organizing System” UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • We can note how these domains and types of collections differ… or we can emphasize that they are all “Organizing Systems” • A collection of resources • Intentionally arranged • To enable some set of interactions 4

  5. Published by MIT Press in May 2013 as a printed book and as epub3 and Kindle ebooksIn August we published an “Academic Edition eBook” with many enhancements to the epub3 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION The Discipline of Organizing 5

  6. The Challenge(s) of Multidisciplinarity UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • A textbook for a multidisciplinary field is challenging to write… • …and changes what a book is • …and changes what an ebook is • …and changes how they are maintained and evolve 6

  7. What Makes a Text Multidisciplinary? UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • Identifies / explains the concepts at the intersection of multiple disciplines • Uses discipline-neutral vocabulary • Incorporates discipline-specific concepts and examples in the context of the transdisciplinary content and vocabulary 7

  8. The Breadth vs. Depth Challenge UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • A BROAD textbook for a multidisciplinary field represents all the disciplines that contribute to it • A DEEP textbook treats all the disciplines with rigor and nuance • Can a textbook be deep and broad at the same time? 8

  9. Battling the Breadth vs. Depth Challenge UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • Using the draft book at different schools purged disciplinary bias, but every adopter and reviewer would suggest topics and examples from their own disciplines to “flesh out the book” • The book grew bigger and bigger and bigger… 9

  10. Solving the Breadth vs. Depth Challenge UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • We had been bloating the book with disciplinary nuance that made the book more credible to experts but made it less accessible for students • The solution turned out to have ancient roots in book design that we have adapted to ebooks 10

  11. The Content of Textbooks A textbook contains many types of content, especially in an evolving multidisciplinary field 11

  12. Supplemental and Core Content Some of this content is “core” and essential to the text. Other content is “supplemental” 12

  13. Supplemental Content UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • “Inline” with the core text • Tables, figures, illustrations, sidebars • “Pointed to” by the core text • Footnotes, endnotes, glossary entries, citations • External to the core text • Appendices, commentaries and reviews, case studies 13

  14. Selective Inclusion of Supplemental Content UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • The simplest mechanism for a personalized reading experience • A reader gets the content and (logically) includes it in the “text stream” • Example: with footnotes, endnotes, glossary terms, bibliographic references, visual or hypertextual inclusion is an optional act by the reader 14

  15. Endnote Markers in Print ENDNOTES MARKED WITH NUMBERED SUPERSCRIPTS Link following “by hand and eye” 15

  16. Using “Tagged Content” to Address the “Breadth” vs. “Depth” Challenge • Supplemental content can be tagged or typed by discipline, target audience, or a contextual category • Reader can use these tags to decide whether or not to read the note • Useful in both print and ebooks but radically different user experiences 16

  17. Tagged Endnotes in TDO UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • About 24% of the content in TDO was converted to endnotes tagged by discipline • This makes depth into a choice rather than a distraction or confusion • Could think of this as “inevitable” disciplinary-specific annotation that we decided to create in advance 17

  18. Tagged Endnotes in Print Book(at end of each chapter)

  19. Pop-up “Web” Note in eBook

  20. Transclusion of Supplemental Content UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • Transclusion – a word coined by hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson, is the automatic or “seamless” incorporation of one resource into another • Transclusion of would be less disruptive for readers than link following or pop-ups • No eBook reader currently transcludes, but we can imagine how it might work 20

  21. Transclusion in eBooks

  22. Making Transclusion Extensible UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • Transclusion mechanisms should be general enough to handle any type of supplemental content • Any instructor or institution should be able to create supplemental content • Except with “offline” reading, supplemental content should be discoverable from anywhere 22

  23. The “Network” Textbook 23

  24. Collaborative Authoring for a Multidisciplinary Text UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • Who can write it? • Where can you start? • What are appropriate authoring tools, collaboration mechanisms, and document architectures that can address the intellectual, procedural, technological, and social/cultural challenges? 24

  25. Three Authoring Options for Achieving Multidisciplinarity UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • Coincidence • - Experts in different disciplines each write a chapter that presents their own perspective on the new discipline 25

  26. Coincidence -> Blind Men and the Elephant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

  27. Three Authoring Options for Achieving Multidisciplinarity UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • Consensus • - Assemble experts in relevant disciplines. Let them develop a shared vision and plan for the book 27

  28. Consensus -> A detailed view of the elephant? Or one with no nuance?

  29. Three Authoring Options for Achieving Multidisciplinarity UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • Evangelism • - One person proposes a vision and plan for the book and recruits experts with specific complementary expertise to become co-authors 29

  30. Evangelism – Leading the Elephant

  31. A Quixotic Quest, or a Successful Crusade?

  32. Evangelical Collaboration with TDO (1) UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • In January 2010, starting with the detailed lecture notes from my Berkeley course, I recruited current and former students to write draft chapters according to an outline I proposed • The lead authors for each chapter did a “slide swap” from the lecture notes to maximize continuity and minimize redundancy 32

  33. Unavoidable “Laws of Collaboration” (1) UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • Conway’s Law – the structure of a system reflects the composition and communication of the group that builds it • How do Committees Invent? (1968) 33

  34. Unavoidable “Laws of Collaboration” (2) UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • Brooks’s Law – adding people to a late project makes it later • The Mythical Man-Month (1975) 34

  35. Evangelical Collaboration with TDO (2) UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • We initially used Word as the authoring software because its ubiquity made it easy to solicit co-authors and reviewers • As the number of contributors increased, we needed better collaboration support than docs-as-attachments • Initially we used generic technology (email, Dropbox, Skype) rather than tools with book-specific collaboration functionality 35

  36. Book-Specific Collaboration Environments UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • We were 90% complete when we learned about O’Reilly’s Atlas single-source publishing system • ASCIIdoc markup editor front end • DocBook XML “under the hood” • git repository for version control • built-in transforms to pdf, html, epub, mobi 36

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  39. From Word to XML; From Collaboration to Control UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • Faced with the need to convert from Word, we decided that native XML would enable more content-based markup and greater automation than ASCIIdoc • This seemed like the optimal time for the evangelist / benevolent dictator and his XML publishing markup editor to finish all the unfinished chapters and edit the entire book end-to-end 39

  40. Authoring and Evolution UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • The original authoring approach shapes the evolution of the book • Bottom up or “emergent consensus” approaches impose relatively weak constraints on possible changes to the book; any part is potentially revisable (a la Wikipedia) (a la DITA) • With a top-down model, the evangelizing author is less willing to allow unconstrained revision; evolution takes place via annotation “at the leaves” rather than by large-scale pruning and grafting (a la DocBook) 40

  41. Managing “Community Content” in TDO • We have just published TDO in a “book browser” format augmented with the hypothesis annotation capability • We hope to create a version in which the existing endnotes appear as hypothesis notes instead • Need to develop a process by which user-contributed notes might co-evolve with the endnotes published with the book 41

  42. So what is an ebook? • An ebook is not a self-contained single book • Any ebook might be a member of a family of books in a logical repository of structured content resources organized by the author(s) to enable the selection and assembly of coherent subsets • The content of the book depends on the capabilities of its ereader, blurring the boundary between book and the software that “reads” it, especially when annotation is enabled 42

  43. Summary UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION • Multidisciplinarity shapes the design of books and ebooks and the processes for creating and maintaining them • Selective inclusion of supplemental content is one solution to the breadth vs. depth challenge • A top-down “evangelism-driven” approach to collaboration encourages an “evolution at the edges” or annotation model of maintenance 43

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