As part of my job, I speak to a lot of grad students about what tech projects they’d like to see happen. Increasingly, students are describing something like this: “I work with a text that I know better than anyone else. I’d like the ability to add video, text, and audio annotation to the text — like a multimedia annotated edition.”
The technology to make this happen does exist. A recent Chronicle article describes something similar, and this company is working on “books” that are perhaps even more advanced than my students are imagining.
The problem is, as far as I can tell, creating these multimedia ebooks requires comfort with XML. Much as I’d like for every grad student to possess this knowledge, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
So in this session, I’d love to hear ideas for ways to create multimedia ebooks that might be accessible to the tech-curious grad student who is nonetheless not prepared to invest the time in learning XML. Perhaps these techniques already exist, or perhaps we need to build them ourselves.
Some notes:
- Adobe InDesign is (purportedly) one way to create multimedia epubs, but my experience with it suggests that learning to create epubs in InDesign is little easier than learning XML
- The Anthologize plugin for WordPress seems to offer intriguing possibilities. WP is a CMS that many students are already comfortable using, and they’re comfortable embedding video in posts. Perhaps Anthologize could be extended to handle video and audio.
- I asked a question on this topic over at DH Answers and got some really good responses.
- I found the Wikipedia article on epub helpful in understanding the standard
#1 by Dennis Moser on February 23, 2011 - 3:00 pm
Adobe InDesign is the love-child of Photoshop and PageMaker…the fundamental concepts are highly visual and can be picked up pretty quickly (it’s specifically designed for building publications…print, if you will…so the paradigms is one we’re already familiar with) and because it’s an Adobe product, many of the behaviors are the same as found in Photoshop or Illustrator. (And no XML needed!)
#2 by Michael Altman on February 23, 2011 - 8:39 pm
I’d be curious to pair the discussion of these ebooks with thoughts about what a “digital dissertation” might look like. In some ways a digital dissertation might just be one of these sorts of ebooks.
#3 by Miriam Posner on February 24, 2011 - 7:48 am
Michael, I think you’re right! I’d totally be into combining our session ideas, since it sounds as though we’re thinking along the same lines.
Pingback: Multimedia ebooks (THATCamp SE session idea) | Academitron
#4 by Lauren Pressley on February 24, 2011 - 1:36 pm
I’m interested in this topic from a slightly different angle. I teach a research class and I’ve been thinking about making an open access online book that combines various ways of conveying information (you can listen to a short recording, watch a video, read the text, etc)… I haven’t started working on it yet, but have started thinking about next steps to make it happen. The session you’re describing might offer some overlap…
#5 by Caroline Barratt on February 24, 2011 - 9:35 pm
I was involved with an e-book for an academic press. We were asked to turn our “traditional” manuscript into something digital by inserting URLs, screen shots, and media. It was an interesting process – trying to think what would add to rather than merely repeat. I would love to learn more about how others are rethinking the scholarly book and how academics can learn the skills necessary to become creators of *good* digital content (also, as a librarian, what my role might be in assisting this process).
#6 by Richard Manly Adams, Jr on February 24, 2011 - 11:12 pm
I think we need to not only re-imagine the book (putting digital context within the printed page), but also the reading process itself. Social networking technologies may allow for people to experience a more social reading process (sharing highlights, notes, questions, etc.). There are some good technologies out there now for this (e-book readers that link to facebook, e.g.), but I haven’t seen a good discussion about the possibilities or dangers of re-thinking the reading process itself.
#7 by Brian Norberg on February 28, 2011 - 1:56 pm
I work with someone who was a coder on Anthology. I will ask him for some inside information and whether there is any plans for later development. As far as I know, the tool was built at two week “camp” and any further development will have to come out of the spare time of the “campers”. Speaking for my coworker, that spare time is minimal. So if Anthology is going to be developed it will most likely come from the open source community and the not the original development team.
I think that this session could also be combined with the session on assessment. When you talk about content managers and “non-backend” required development software, you are always going to run into preservation and sustainability problems. I believe that preservation and sustainability should be at the heart of DH assessment. So really the assessment and tool discussion need to be had together.
#8 by Brian Croxall on February 28, 2011 - 9:18 pm
While I’m all for learning as much as possible and giving graduate students real, transferable skills like XML, it’s also true that graduate students didn’t learn to print their own books before getting a bound copy of their dissertation handed to them. Tools like InDesign, Anthologize, and others can help lower the barriers to digital book design, but don’t forget that the task could be handed off to someone else–as happens with book design most of the time today.
I’m not trying to just plague Miriam (although goodness knows I like doing that). But I think the real answer is going to be something like the U of Michigan Press, which has become embedded in the library. I don’t know a whole lot about their process, but bringing together people from a press and people who are ultimately responsible for caring for the press’s output (read, librarians) seems like a great way to figure out how to make sustainable, workable multimedia texts.
#9 by Miriam Posner on March 1, 2011 - 1:14 am
I don’t know, Brian. I see what you’re saying about a place for publishers in the library (and that does sound intriguing). But what I’m hearing is interest not in a “published” book (i.e., professionally designed, with a publisher’s imprint), but in a self-produced project.
It occurs to me, though, that I could be thinking about this the wrong way. Really, what’s the big deal about an epub? Could the product not be presented as a webpage, as Brewster Kahle and others have argued in Books in Browsers?
#10 by Brian Croxall on March 1, 2011 - 8:30 pm
Well, I think that we get hung up on things that are book-like because that is what the academy values and it is what grad students are expected to produce. (And the latter is part of why you’re coming at this question, if I understand the post correctly.)
It’s not all that hard to make the equivalent of an artist’s book, by creating everything by hand, as you might on a website. And the wonderful thing about the web, as opposed to regular artist’s books, is that one copy serves all. But on the other hand, if you want your artist’s book to be readable on a variety of different platforms…well, that’s where standards like epub, Kindle formats, etc., etc., etc. become useful.