How a prototype argues

Alan Galey

Faculty of InformationBook History and Print Culture Program

University of Toronto Canada

Stan Ruecker

University of Alberta Canada

With the INKE Team1

AbstractIn this article we argue that just as an edition of a book can be a means ofreifying a theory about how books should be edited so can the creation of anexperimental digital prototype be understood as conveying an argument aboutdesigning interfaces Building on this premise we explore theoretical affinitiesshared by recent design and book history scholarship and connect those theoriesto the emerging practice of peer-reviewing digital objects in scholarly contextsWe suggest a checklist for subjecting prototypes directly to peer review

Is the argument reified by the prototype contestable defensible andsubstantive

Does the prototype have a recognizable position in the context of similarwork either in terms of concept or affordances

Is the prototype part of a series of prototypes with an identifiable trajectory Does the prototype address possible objections Is the prototype itself an original contribution to knowledge

We also outline some implications for funding agencies interested in supportingresearchers who are designing experimental computer prototypes For instance ifa series of prototypes functions as a set of smaller arguments within a largerdebate it might be more appropriate to fund the sequence rather than treatingeach project as an individual proposal

1 Prototypes as theories

It makes a difference whether we think in terms ofprocesses or of products The differences betweencomputer and computing or model and modellingare more than grammatical As Willard McCartyasserts the participle lsquoturns things into algorithmicperformancesrsquo (2008 p 254) and signals intellec-tual processes whose full complexity cannot be con-tained within single artifacts It thus enriches ourvocabulary far more to speak of computing than of

the computer That principle also helps explain thewidespread takeup of John Unsworthrsquos idea ofscholarly primitivesmdashdiscovering annotating com-paring and so onmdashwhich he expressed not asnouns but as participles implying communities ofpractice based on performable actions not justshared products (Unsworth 2000) Our intentionis to extend this logic of process to terms likedesigning and prototyping both of which name activ-ities at the core of the digital humanities We ap-proach this issue by exploring how the often

Correspondence

Alan Galey

Faculty of InformationBook

History and Print Culture

Program

University of Toronto

Email

alangaleyutorontoca

Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010 The Author 2010 Published by Oxford University Press onbehalf of ALLC and ACH All rights reserved For Permissions please email journalspermissionsoxfordjournalsorg

405

doi101093llcfqq021 Advance Access published on 27 October 2010

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

disparate fields of design and book history under-stand the relationship between artifact and processBoth of these fields operate in the messy middleground between interpretation and making andboth can contribute to a theoretical framework fornew questions facing humanists

The Implementing New Knowledge Environ-ments (INKE) project for example includes re-search teams based in Interface Design andTextual Studies among others with all researchersworking collaboratively on strategic prototypes fornew reading environments (Siemens et al 2009Galey et al forthcoming) As these sorts of collab-orations become viable on a broad scale it becomesessential to develop shared vocabularies and re-search questions Accordingly this article aims toaddress the questions of how the process of design-ing may be used simultaneously for creating anartifact and as a process of critical interpretationand whether new forms of digital objects such asinterface components and visualization tools con-tain arguments that advance knowledge about theworld We explore these questions first by exploringtheoretical affinities shared by recent design andbook history scholarship and then by connectingthose theories to the emerging practice ofpeer-reviewing digital objects in scholarly contexts

These questions touch upon scholarly best prac-tices and their codification Guidelines abound inthe digital humanities and yet although we haveguidelines for evaluating digital scholarship in insti-tutional contexts (see the MLArsquos Guidelines forEvaluating Work with Digital Media in theModern Languages) the profession has paid lessattention to how to evaluate the products and pro-cesses of digital scholarship as intellectual contribu-tions How can design become a process of criticalinquiry itself not just the embodiment of the re-sults This question puts at stake some of our fun-damental assumptions about the relationship oftools to interpretation and of research products toresearch processes

One longstanding tradition of design is to under-stand it as an invisible handmaiden to contentwhere form follows function and where the typog-raphy in a book for example becomes transparentto the reader (Bringhurst 2005) Good design in

this school of thought is design that goes unnoticedAn alternative tradition treats design as creative ex-pression where the hand of the designer is evidentand we see a style that can be associated with theperson responsible (Rand 1985) A related vari-ation sometimes referred to as critical design ispredicated on design as a rejection of the first trad-ition resulting in for example typography that isintentionally difficult to read and chairs that no onecan sit in (Dunne 2005) All of these approaches todesign have their place and we would argue thateach of them can legitimately be understood as aform of interpretation However we also proposethat there is another distinct possibility where oneof the goals of the designer has been deliberately tocarry out an interpretive act in the course of produ-cing an artifact2 As Lev Manovich has publiclyphrased it lsquoa prototype is a theoryrsquo (2007) One ofthe functions of the artifact then becomes to com-municate that interpretation and to make it pro-ductively contestable

Our purpose in this article is to find a usefulbridge between the tool-building tradition of thedigital humanities on one hand and interpretiveand critical traditions like book history and scienceand technology studies on the other As digitalhumanities tool-buildingmdashanother participlemdashmatures from being primarily service-based toinquiry-based now may be an apt time to revisitan argument made by Langdon Winner in histouchstone essay lsquoDo Artifacts Have Politicsrsquo(1980) In Winnerrsquos analysis of Robert Mosesrsquos in-famous design for Long Islandrsquos expresswaysmdashwithoverpasses deliberately too low for public transitbusses to clear effectively barring access to partsof Long Island to all but (mostly white) carownersmdashhe argues for an understanding of technol-ogy and society that lsquotakes technical artifacts ser-iouslyrsquo and pays lsquoattention to the characteristics oftechnical objects and the meaning of those charac-teristicsrsquo (1980 p 123) Book historians designscholars and digital humanists alike have beenmaking the very same case in recent years butfrom the perspective of makers users and criticsof highly technical objects Though our digital ob-jects may be new and not necessarily the kind ima-gined by Winner his article makes a point that

A Galey and S Ruecker

406 Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

builders and critics of tools alike cannot afford toignore lsquoIf our moral and political language for eval-uating technology includes only categories having todo with tools and uses if it does not include atten-tion to the meaning of the designs and arrange-ments of our artifacts then we will be blinded tomuch that is intellectually and practically crucialrsquo(1980 p 125) In this view even doorknobs havepolitics in that they may be round requiring ahuman hand to turn them or shaped as leverssuch that a person with a prosthetic limb or anarmload of groceries with one free elbow can stillsuccessfully use them This is more than simply amatter of utility Both designs are political in thatthey presume and construct different kinds ofworlds with the round doorknob presuming aworld in which everyonersquos bodies are the sameand in which hands with opposable thumbs andsufficient grip strength are always available

Again these are familiar arguments in fields likeinclusive or universal design and science and tech-nology studies The digital humanities must not losesight of the design of artifacts as a critical act onethat may reflect insights into materials and advancean argument about an artifactrsquos role in the worldOur purpose here is to follow the implications of ahermeneutical approach to design for digital huma-nities projects that entail the strategic prototyping ofdigital artifacts We both lead projects separatelyand together which combine digital prototypingwith critical analysis and focus on a researchmodel rather than a service model (a crucial distinc-tion for the INKE project for example) Our variouscollaborations have prompted us to look for waysthat our respective home fields of design and bookhistory intersect

The argument we offer is two-pronged First weoffer book history and design as examples of twofields that have more or less independently beentheorizing the collaborative production of artifactsas a critical and creative process involving multiplekinds of agency worthy of analysis These are by nomeans the only fields where this tendency is pre-sentmdashthere are similar examples in film studiessoftware studies and literary studies to name afewmdashand recognizing this methodological linkacross fields benefits all of them particularly those

located at intersections like digital humanities andbook history We argue that the digital artifacts hu-manists create can do more than simply measure upto standards for interoperability and usability Werecognize that digital artifacts have meaning notjust utility and may constitute original contribu-tions to knowledge in their own right The conse-quence of this argument is that digital artifactsthemselvesmdashnot just their surrogate projectreportsmdashshould stand as peer-reviewable forms ofresearch worthy of professional credit and contest-able as forms of argument

2 Design and interpretation inthe history of the book

Ideas about design enter the digital humanities froma number of directions each bringing certain dis-ciplinary predispositions with them Edward Tuftefor example has published several books richly de-picting the variety of information design strategiesoften with the same comprehensive historical scopeone finds in book history conferences and publica-tions but without the deep contextualization bookhistory brings to the objects it studies (cf Tufte1997) Like design the field of book history offersa perspective on the ethos of thinking throughmaking which informs much digital humanities re-search and pedagogy generally Manovichrsquos asser-tion that lsquoevery prototype is a theoryrsquo has acounterpart in Bernard Cerquiglinirsquos claim for text-ual scholarship that lsquoevery edition is a theoryrsquo (1999p 79) The symmetry of these two statements ex-tends to much of design and book history as cognatebut often separate fields

New forms of scholarly creation especially thoseemerging from the digital humanities need to beunderstood within the epistemic contexts thatdesign and book history have concurrently beenmodeling in recent years Although literary studiesand hypertext theory have in the wake ofpost-structuralism redefined what it can mean tobe an author it has fallen to book historians torecontextualize authorship within broader contextsof meaning-making that are not purely linguistic ortextual but also materialmdashsuch that authoring

How a prototype argues

Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010 407

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

becomes only one activity among many includingdesigning manufacturing modifying reading theseand other processes shape the meanings of booksand are no less vital to the interpretive potential ofdigital artifacts

Book history an interdisciplinary field compris-ing history bibliography and literary studies(Howsam 2006) has a more complex relationshipwith design than may appear on the surface In itsmost public form of dissemination the academicmonograph (usually single-author) book historymay seem to non-practitioners to be more con-cerned with understanding the past from a distanceanalyzing and commenting upon the history ofbooks with tremendous acuity and vigour but notdirectly intervening in the stories its practitionerstell On closer inspection however we can findforms of textual scholarship whose scholarly primi-tives can materially change the field of evidencesuch as book historians who uncover new artifactsthrough archival research (discovering cfTischendorf 1867) and analytical bibliographerswho radically change our understanding of howparticular books came to be as they are (usually bycomparing cf Hinman 1963) We also find editorialtheorists and literary critics who change thosestories in effect by prompting us to look withnew eyes at the same evidence and to revise thevocabularies we use to conceptualize foundationalideas Although we are a long way from the periodwhen the definitive account of the printing tradewas written by a printer (Moxon 1683) one canlook at recent history and find textual scholarswho themselves operate presses and design books

Studying the history of book design has longbeen part of bibliography but the work of D FMcKenzie Jerome McGann and others since the1980s has brought the materiality of texts to theattention of wider audiences in the humanitiesand emphasized the crucial link between thedesign factors in a textrsquos material forms and thattextrsquos possible interpretations (McGann 1991McKenzie 1999) Fredson Bowers for exampleexcoriated literary scholars for failing to accountfor material influences in the transmission of textsbut did so with textual accuracy as his foremostconcern (Bowers 1959) By contrast McKenziersquos

1985 Panizzi Lectures published the following yearand again in 1999 as Bibliography and the Sociologyof Texts accomplished a more successful kind ofoutreach by emphasizing the meaning-makingpower of book design and material form He alsodrew attention to the importance of collaborationbetween multiple agents in the construction ofmeaning in books and other textual artifacts ex-pressed in the simple formulation lsquoforms effectmeaningrsquo (1999 p 13) Where Bowers sought todrag literary interpreters back down to earthMcKenzie instead brought the objects of interpret-ation back to the level of the human emphasizingtextsrsquo physical embodiment in particular editions(eg McKenzie 2002) historical documents (eghis discussion of the Treaty of Waitangi inMcKenzie 1999 pp 77ndash128) and even features oflandscape in aboriginal cultures (eg his discussionof the Arunta country in Australia in McKenzie1999 pp 39ndash41)

His approach to the sociology of texts waswell-timed coinciding not only with the rise ofbook history as a new field but also with the pro-liferation of personal computers and other formsof digital media In the two decades sinceMcKenziersquos Panizzi Lectures the study of designin the history of the book has progressed from chro-nicling aesthetic and technological developmentsto become something more like the history ofmeaning-making through design Practitioners inboth fields study the intimate and profound connec-tions between how things work and what they mean

3 Documents as conversationspeer review as paratext

The printed book has functioned as both an objectand a means of peer review These two functionshave intersected at crucial moments in the develop-ment of the bookrsquos material form and the design ofbooks often reflectsmdasheven shapesmdashtheir antici-pated evaluation by communities of expert readersIn our own time traditional models for peer revieware being challenged in tandem with traditionalforms of the book as for example (Fig 1) inMediaCommons Pressrsquos open peer-review process

A Galey and S Ruecker

408 Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

for Kathleen Fitzpatrickrsquos book PlannedObsolescence Publishing Technology and theFuture of the Academy3 At the time of writing inthe winter of 2010 a draft of Fitzpatrickrsquos book ispublicly available on the Web via an interfacewhich records paragraph-by-paragraph annotationsby readers and permits notes on those notes andso onmdashincluding responses by the author herselfIt is no coincidence that Fitzpatrickrsquos book aboutpeer review is itself a prototype for the review pro-cess it describes Like other prototypes it demandsevaluation not just of its content but also of its formas a digital object Her draft chapter on lsquoThe History

of Peer Reviewrsquo surveys crucial moments in the de-velopment of peer review as a process such as theRoyal Societyrsquos creation in 1752 of a Committee onPapers for its journal Philosophical Transactions (seealso Kronick 2004)

However it may be worth taking a broader viewof related practices in the history of the book as weadvocate in this paper For example Adrian Johnssuggests that the Royal Societyrsquos peer-review prac-tices began not with the papers reviewed in the earlyto mid-eighteenth century but as early as 1661 viathe Societyrsquos system of lsquoperusalrsquo a kind of gift econ-omy in which whole books or manuscripts were

Fig 1 Text and commentary from Fitzpatrickrsquos Planned Obsolescence as it appears in MediaCommons Pressrsquosopen-review interface

How a prototype argues

Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010 409

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

presented to the Society delegated to a specificreader and discussed among the Societyrsquos member-ship as part of a complex system of responses(Johns 1998 pp 482ndash91) Worth noting with aview to our argument about peer review of artifactsis Johnsrsquos point that the Royal Societyrsquos officialbooks for registering submitted letters and papersgrew to include theories and hypotheses in generalas well as artifacts and inventions (pp 485ndash6) Thelatter were usually submitted (in a sealed box heldby the Societyrsquos secretary) not for peer review but tosettle disputes over priority The convergence ofthese mechanisms anticipates our own view ofdigital prototypes This system depended not onlyon print as a technology but also on the inclusivesociology of texts that McKenzie extended to mediaof all kinds old and new In this light a parallelhistory of antecedents for emerging forms of peerreview may be found by examining the connectionsbetween book design paratext such as annotationsand prefatory materials and the emergence of peerreview itself

Planned Obsolescence and CommentPress maketheir argument jointly through the relationship be-tween text and notes made possible by the interfaceAs can be seen in Fig 1 the interface itself and thekind of dialogue it permits are relatively familiarannotations are not merely product reviews in thegenre of user comments on retail websites likeAmazoncom but rather the kind of dialogue be-tween author and readers that we associate withblogging (the interface CommentPress is a pluginfor the WordPress blogging engine) As annotationsto a single text however the reviewersrsquo commentsalso continue a long tradition of collaborative an-notation in the history of the book

For example CommentPressrsquos goal of lsquoturning adocument into a conversationrsquo (httpwwwfutureofthebookorgcommentpress) has an antecedentin the early editions of Utopia Literary scholarsand historians have long recognized the first Latineditions of Utopia to be among the most importantearly humanist books to combine printed annota-tion and other forms of paratext with the idea of acommunity of peers (Allen 1963 Carlson 1993Jardine 1993 Leslie 1998 Kinney 2005 Massai2007 pp 49ndash55) such that sole attribution to

More as an individual author misrepresents the col-laborative nature of Utopia as a project As with theCommentPress interface its early editions stand onthe threshold between books as published productsand conversations as unfolding processes Withtheir successive changes and additions to Utopiarsquoscomplex paratextual frame the editions of 1516(Louvain) 1517 (Paris) and 1518 (Basel) begin toseem like a series of iterative prototypes4 Certainlyby 1518 Utopia could be regarded as a creation notjust of its named author Thomas More but also ofseveral collaborating agents including other hu-manists in Morersquos circle such as Erasmus andPeter Giles both of whom contributed prefatoryletters and possibly the editionrsquos printed marginaliathe humanist printer John Froben and the engraverAmbrosius Holbein whose contributions included afigure of the fictional island and an image of thedialogue in Gilesrsquos garden represented in the book

The printed glosses which first appear with the1518 edition of Utopia sometimes attributed toGiles or Erasmus signal only a fragment of the col-laborative efforts which generated Utopia as a hu-manistic experiment in the possible relationsbetween imaginative literature social critiquecouched in irony and the design of the printedbook As Warren Wooden and John Wall haveargued even details in Holbeinrsquos woodcuts suchas the distinctive ornamental vines which connectthe map of Utopia to the figure of the dialogueabout it (see Fig 2) work together by design tosupport Utopiarsquos metafictional frames-within-frames (Wooden and Wall 1985)

Another key to this experiment was the layer ofcommendatory letters between the members ofMore and Erasmusrsquos circle which framed the earlyeditions of Utopia and which by 1518 had expandedinto a network of exchanges between peers withMorersquos text at their centre Like the online annota-tions solicited by CommentPressrsquos open peer-reviewprocess the early letters accompanying Utopia serveboth to authorize the text bestowing individualstamps of approval and to contextualize it withina specific community of readers As Peter Allen sug-gests lsquoOn its first appearance then Utopia carriedwith it a group of names which would clearly iden-tify it for the knowledgeable sixteenth-century

A Galey and S Ruecker

410 Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

reader as a document of northern Europeannot just English humanismrsquo (1963 p 97) Suchauthorization was no less a form of lsquoeditorialmarketingrsquo (Vallee 2004 p 53) than the lists ofrespected peer-reviewers found in present-dayscholarly journals Taking Allenrsquos reading togetherwith Wooden and Wallrsquos we could say that the 1518Utopia editions had the equivalents of both aneditorial board (the prefatory letter-writers) and adesign team (Erasmus Froben Holbein andperhaps others)

What we see in Utopiamdashas one example amongmanymdashis a precursor to open peer review in theform of these scholarsrsquo efforts to create asAnthony Grafton describes it lsquoa new kind of virtualcommunity that was sustained not by immediate

direct contact and conversation so much as by adecades-long effort of writing and rewritingrsquo(2009 p 23) However as we have been arguingterms like writing and rewriting may too easily con-flate other meaning-making activities like designingwhich must be recognized if we are to understandboth the history and the future of the book Thecomplex emergence of peer review broadly con-strued to include the humanities and not just thesciences requires us to contextualize recent proto-types like CommentPress not only within develop-ments in intellectual history but also withinchanges in the design of those material objectsthat gave intellectual history its shape These proto-types were theories whose meaning was inseparablefrom their material form

4 The arguments of objects andprocesses

If we take seriously the idea that books and otherobjects from the past can embody complex ideasabout the cultures that created and used themwhat then of the digital objects that we design inthe present By understanding how fields like bookhistory take the design decisions embedded in phys-ical artifacts as interpretive objects we can begin tosee digital humanistsrsquo creation of new digital arti-facts as interpretive acts The word book in bookhistory is deceptively narrow we use it as LeslieHowsam suggests lsquoonly for lack of any better col-lective nounrsquo (2006 p 3) Within the digital huma-nities attention to the design of the lsquoexpressiveformrsquo of books and lsquonon-book textsrsquo (McKenzie1999) is poised to extend into the study of digitalobjects including electronic literature and videogames Although McKenzie suggested a natural ex-tension of bibliographyrsquos analytical and interpretivemethods to texts in all media including film soundrecording and electronic text the digital object pre-sents challenges to hermeneutic assumptions carriedforward from the print-based bibliography of thepast century Anthony Dunne aptly describes theinterdisciplinary challenge when he asks lsquoHow canwe discover analogue complexity in digital phenom-ena without abandoning the rich culture of the

Fig 2 The first page of Book 1 of the 1518 Utopia featur-ing Holbeinrsquos woodcut of the dialogue which frames thebook (reproduced by permission of the HuntingtonLibrary San Marino California)

How a prototype argues

Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010 411

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

physical or superimposing the known and comfort-able onto the new and alienrsquo (2005 p 17)

In contrast to digital text production and soft-ware design we have a fairly well-defined under-standing of the traditional roles of non-authorialagents in print and manuscript book productionsuch as scribes binders typographers compositorscorrectors and illustrators lsquoThe sociology of textsrsquonames an interpretive orientation which embracesthese agentsrsquo contributions to the traditionally au-thorial process of meaning-making In essence bookhistory has embraced design as a hermeneutic pro-cess but has done so using a print-based vocabularyinherited from bibliography Reciprocally WilliamGaver and others in the worlds of design andhumanndashcomputer interaction have been incorporat-ing into their work an emphasis on interpretationand ambiguity acknowledging the influence ofhumanities perspectives but also drawing on a vo-cabulary suited to systems as well as artifacts and tofuture designs as well as past ones (Gaver et al2003 Sengers and Gaver 2006) The challengenow is to bring these perspectives together to under-stand the kinds of agency that produce meaning indigital objects and to appreciate the critical poten-tial of digital objects in terms limited neither toprint culture nor to the utilitarianism of industrialdesign (Dunne 2005)

We believe that the theoretical questions andconvergences described above are strongly relevantto the emerging area of peer review evaluation andauthorship status of digital objects Just as theboundary between digital documents and softwareapplications has become less distinct due to webtechnologies so has the boundary between trad-itional scholarly monographs and digital objectssuch as the lsquointeractive media submissionsrsquo solicitedby Digital Humanities Quarterly and Vectors Byrecognizing that digital objectsmdashsuch as interfacesgames tools electronic literature and text visualiza-tionsmdashmay contain arguments subjectable topeer review digital humanities scholars are assum-ing a perspective similar to that of book historianswho study the sociology of texts In this sensethe concept of design has developed beyond pureutilitarianism or creative expressiveness to take ona status equal to critical inquiry albeit with a

more complicated relation to materiality andauthorship

If we take seriously the suggestion that a digitalobject can embody an argument then it should bepossible to apply to digital objects some of thestandard criteria for reviewing arguments ForBooth et al (2008) the three key components of agood thesis topic are that it is contestable defens-ible and substantive To be contestable the thesismust try to convince people of a position that noteveryone already believes To be defensible it mustbe possible given the right kind of argument orevidence that members of a reasonable audiencecould be convinced to change their minds andaccept it To be substantive the argument must beworth the time and effort it takes for the writer tomake it and the reader to engage with it

For a prototype we propose that contestabilitymight reasonably consist of the inclusion some-where in the interface of either an old affordanceearlier seen in other interfaces but now done in anew way or else a new affordancemdashone not earlierseen Defensibility might equate to the heuristicevaluation of the possible strengths and weaknessesof the new affordance both in its own right and alsoin comparison with other ways of providing thesame affordance

For instance someone might be proposing a newvisual browser for text collections such as Texttiles(Giacometti et al 2008) Texttiles provides a set ofsmall tiles that can be dynamically sorted There aremany existing alternatives for file browsing includ-ing conventional methods such as hierarchicaltrees (as in desktop file systems) advanced methodssuch as coverflow interfaces and experimentalapproaches such as microsliders (Ahlberg andShneiderman 1994) In order to subject theTexttiles prototype to peer review it would beuseful to expand this catalog to include as manyvarieties of visual systems as possible for file hand-ling that have been attempted and to compare thestrengths and weaknesses of the new system in thecontext of the others

Another frequent form of evidence consists of theresults of user studies which often involve measuresof performance or preference For old affordanceshandled in a new way the studies could be

A Galey and S Ruecker

412 Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

comparative For new affordances comparison isnot really possible but the strategies that can beadopted include looking at what we have elsewherecalled lsquoaffordance strengthrsquo (Paredes-Olea et al2008 Ruecker 2006) However since we arearguing here for a direct form of peer review thatis unmediated by an accompanying article or studywe must discount the possibility of evidence fromuser studies which in any case tends to be mostsatisfying and useful during the formative phase ofa project rather than as a means of justifying a toolthat has already been completed

Whether or not a prototype idea is substantive issomewhat harder to determine It rests on the po-tential significance of the design both in terms ofintellectual importance and practical value It is notalways possible to evaluate such factors withany precision especially early in the process Thisis however equally true for conventionalscholarship

In addition to the argument made by a singleprototype it is also important in some cases tolook at a trajectory of iterations of the prototypeor of the larger research project that has producedthe prototypes Iteration involves a series of deci-sions about the argument being made whichshould best be understood by considering the alter-native choices that were available at each stage Forexample as Roberts-Smith et al (2009) argue theWatching the Script project began with a 2D stylizedinterface that privileged the concept of the text asthe central governing object in the production of aplay The current 3D version of the interface on theother hand takes as its central organizing principlethe Aristotelian line of action which includes thetext but emphases directorial choices about every-thing that is happening on stage This change inperspective has had profound consequences for theprototype including the need to support a full rangeof viewing angles of the stage and the radical decou-pling of movement from speech

The question of authorship is another factor toconsider in the adoption of peer review of digitalobjects Unlike research results in the sciences artsresearch is still frequently published by a singleauthor However in the case of digital objects itis rare for a single person to be responsible for the

entire process of conceptualization design develop-ment and testing (Sinclair et al 2003) At whatpoint is a contribution significant enough to war-rant the digital equivalent of authorship Whoshould be first authormdashthe person who had the ori-ginal idea or the person who did the bulk of thedesign or the person who did the programmingThese are questions which if asked within abook-history context would resonate with RogerStoddardrsquos often-quoted assertion that lsquoauthors donot write books Books are not written at all Theyare manufactured by scribes and others artisans bymechanics and other engineers and by printingpresses and other machinesrsquo (1987 emphasis in ori-ginal) Peer review of digital objects thus involvesdigital humanities in a kind of sociology of textswith respect to the re-evaluation of authorshipwhile also foregrounding new aspects of digitaldesign such as fragmentariness modularity andinteroperability

5 Peer review of digital objects

We propose that it is possible to interpret digitalobjects and in particular experimental prototypesas forms of argument Our contention is that thiskind of interpretation can be the basis for academicpeer review of the prototypes themselves not just ofarticles that describe prototypes In this section weoutline a set of conditions that should be met inorder for peer review of digital objects to be suc-cessful and provide a checklist that may serve as astarting point for peer reviewers

First it is necessary to determine whether or nota prototype is intended to be making an argumentor whether it is something else entirely such as aproduction system Just as in the complex system ofother forms of scholarly knowledge it is thereforenecessary for the reviewers to be familiar with thecontext of the prototype within the history of pro-totyping and to be sensitive to the nuances of thegenre

The idea of a genre of prototype can be under-stood in two ways First is the possibility that thereare a range of related pieces of software that eitherwork in somewhat the same ways or else attempt to

How a prototype argues

Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010 413

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

provide the same affordances Second is prototypegenre in the sense of design transferability (Chowand Ruecker 2006) where a prototype designed forone set of users working in a particular domain istransferred to a new set of users in a new domainsuch as civil engineers using maps and antiquariansusing facsimiles based on the same technology Inthis case the concept for the prototype may havealready been well established in another contentdomain but not in the current one so that for ex-ample an innovation in image browsing has beenintroduced for collections of photographs but hasnot been used for collections of 3D objects in arche-ology In these cases part of the review should in-volve discussion of how well the prototype addressesthe needs of the new domain and whether modifi-cations were required for the transfer

Once it is clear that the prototype does reify anargument it is necessary to identify the variouspoints being raised This process can be somewhatdifficult since visual arguments like writtenarguments may require some unpacking and testingand ruminating A visual argument is not likely toproceed through a series of syllogisms but manywritten arguments are similarly less formalReviewing the points in a visual argument involvesidentifying the larger argument then examiningvisual details to see how they contribute to thewhole It is also useful to look for ways in whichthe prototype attempts to accommodate possibleobjections as it is often the case that these attemptswill result in compromises to the purity of theprototype idea For example a browsing prototypemay also include a search function While searchfunctions are not intrinsic to the affordance ofbrowsing it is widely understood that search func-tions are helpful and that any subsequent user studywould consider the lack of a search function worthmentioning

In the context of peer review it is perhaps alsoworth mentioning that it may not be the most ef-fective approach to have the designers and program-mers responsible for a new prototype also providethe analysis and description of their own work inthe context of reporting on a user study First it isvery difficult to establish the proper intellectualbasis for the critique Second as with authors so

with designers and programmersmdashthey are notalways the best critics of their own arguments

Finally we should address the thorny question ofwhen it is best to provide the peer review of a proto-type If we consider a development process thatbegins with design sketches (first static then kinet-ic) moves to a working prototype (either verticalwith one important function working properly orhorizontal with many functions working superfi-cially) then continues to a production system(with everything working to some extent althoughstill subject to bug fixing and iterative improve-ment) we are presented with a spectrum ofpossibilities

From the perspective of computing science thedesign is usually not sufficient Computer scientistshave a well-founded fear of lsquovaporwarersquo where de-signers discuss features for systems that have neverexisted and will never exist and the obvious answeris to only deal with working prototypes The disad-vantage of this approach is that it devalues design tothe point that it can be nonexistent

From the perspective of researchers and grantingagencies it would perhaps be most useful to intro-duce a first peer review stage following designbefore the time and expense of building the proto-type ever occurs lsquoPaper prototypingrsquo was awell-established method in the visual communica-tion design community by the early 1990s and con-tinues to be used by designers to take papermockups into user studies (eg Helmer-Poggenpohl 1999) Prototypes that pass peerreview at the design stage would then have moreauthority when seeking resources for programminguser studies and further phases of peer review

A checklist for peer-reviewers might read asfollows

Is the argument reified by the prototype contest-able defensible and substantive

Does the prototype have a recognizable positionin the context of similar work either in terms ofconcept or affordances

Is the prototype part of a series of prototypeswith an identifiable trajectory

Does the prototype address possible objections Is the prototype itself an original contribution to

knowledge

A Galey and S Ruecker

414 Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

It is worth noting the difference between the abovecriteria and those which normally apply in moreentrepreneurial scenarios is it useful will it workis it the most efficient design will it be profitable isit patentable These are relevant questions in manycontexts but as Winner argued there is a danger inreducing the meaning of an object to its use-value

6 Case studies of digital objects

As examples of how the peer review process fordigital objects might work we offer three briefcase studies consisting of radically different kindsof prototypes Stefanie Posavecrsquos Literary OrganismW Bradford Paleyrsquos TextArc and Adrian CheokrsquosPoultry Internet

In her Literary Organism project (Figs 3 and 4)Stefanie Posavec provides a visualization of JackKerouacrsquos On the Road Posavec creates a set offlowers that represent themes in the book with dif-ferent colours while a branching structure repre-sents the ordered hierarchy of content objectsfrom chapters down to words

There appear to be several related arguments ex-pressed by Literary Organism

an infographic can be beautiful as well asmeaningful

themes can be used as the basis for an info-graphic about a novel

prospect on the entire text is worthwhile an infographic about a novel need not contain

words or directly represent numbers

Taking the items in sequence it seems importantfirst of all that Posavec is insisting on the beautyof the infographic A person can read Robert LHarrisrsquos monumental Information Graphics AComprehensive Illustrated Reference (2000) fromcover to cover without having the point broughthome that a beautiful object is more attractive tospend time studying than a plain object Yet inPosavecrsquos work the beauty of the image is themost immediately striking thing about it

There are however some potential objections toPosavecrsquos argument First is that not everyone mayagree on what is beautiful or attractive Despite the

difference in peoplersquos tastes however it is possibleto argue that the manifest attention to detail in abeautiful object still produces some effectmdashperhapseven increasing the userrsquos trust in the quality of theprototype (Ruecker et al 2007) From this pointcomes a second and perhaps more serious objec-tion that attractive objects may arouse suspicion inthe viewer who feels in danger of an attempted ma-nipulation This suspicion is particularly acute inthe academic world where there is an establishedrhetoric of resistance to commercial interests arisingfrom a legitimate concern that someone may belsquoselling somethingrsquo rather than presenting abalanced argument

That themes can serve as the basis for an info-graphic is similarly unusual in the context of otherinfographics Although it is possible to find visual-izations based on words (cf TextArc to follow) weare much more used to seeing a phenomenon con-verted to numbers and thus numerically displayedin an infographic Emphasizing the themes ofKerouacrsquos work suggests that the manual identifica-tion of themes is part of the process since tech-niques for the automatic identification of themesare still themselves in the experimental stage Infact elsewhere on her site is an image of the workin progress showing how she manually highlightedand marked the themes in the text using colouredmarkers and pens (Fig 5)

Third is the argument that prospect on the entiretext is worthwhile Posavec does not produce por-tions of the diagram but instead includes the com-plete text Although it is becoming increasinglyrecognized that people are able to deal very well inperceptual terms with complex environments andin particular with those where they have someagency over the data we live with the legacy of in-formation overload a concern that is valid undercertain circumstances but not necessarily underwell-designed ones

Finally Posavec proposes that the diagram doesnot need to include two affordances that are nor-mally expected there are no actual words and thereis no interactivity in the sense of tools to selectivelysearch or otherwise emphasize different portions ofthe image or to access the text There is a contestableelement in each of these visual assertions The last is

How a prototype argues

Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010 415

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

probably the least defensible and the design couldbe strengthened in several ways by providing variousforms of interactivity including direct access to thetext This kind of increased affordance would alsorender the design significantly more substantive asan argument

Our second case study looks at W BradfordPaleyrsquos TextArc visualization (Fig 6) TextArc hasbeen well-known in the digital humanities commu-nity for many years representing a striking depart-ure from earlier concordancing approaches such asthe Key Word In Context (KWIC) list5 That de-parture in the direction of the visual overview ofthe entire document is the most central contestableelement in the prototype TextArc also shares withLiterary Organism the concept that infographics canbe beautiful without losing their function Its leastdefensible argument however is that this muchvisual complexity is appropriate for a collocationtool

It is worth noting that both the LiteraryOrganism and TextArc visualizations make argu-ments which require not simply comprehension ofdata but the kind of active interpretation of textsthat sometimes involves reading against the grainFor example both are contestable at the level oftheir overt assertions as we have discussed butboth digital objects also make consequential argu-ments at the level of form in the way they tacitlyrepresent their materials Literary Organismsrsquos treesuse a visual structure found in the natural sciences(such as cladistics) as well as in textual scholarship(such as the stemmatic trees used to chart the rela-tionships between material witnesses of texts) andphilosophy (such as the scheme of branches ofknowledge represented in the Encyclopedie) In allthese cases the potential disjunction between ma-terials and representational scheme has promptedcontestation6 In the case of Literary Organismsone might object to Posavecrsquos matching of one

Fig 3 Detail of Stefanie Posavecrsquos Literary Organism design which shows Part One of Jack Kerouacrsquos On the Road(reproduced with permission from Stefanie Posavec)

A Galey and S Ruecker

416 Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

theme or another with any given part of the text oreven to her categorization of themesmdashthough asFig 5 shows she has visualized these assumptionsforthrightly in a way that invites alternate readingsHowever reading Posavecrsquos visualizations critically

also requires us to pay attention to the expressiveform of the digital object The form of the tree de-pends on the premise that a novel like On the Roadmay be represented as an ordered hierarchy of con-tent objects a premise which has been fiercely

Fig 4 This poster shows the entire text of On the Road as configured into branching colour-coded themes by StefaniePosavec (reproduced with permission from Stefanie Posavec)

How a prototype argues

Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010 417

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

Fig 5 Posavec shows here some of the manual work done in preparation for the infographic involving marking thethemes in the text with a highlighter and pen (reproduced with permission from Stefanie Posavec)

A Galey and S Ruecker

418 Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

debated (DeRose et al 1990 Renear 1997McGann 2001 p 185 Hayles 2005 pp 89ndash116Robinson 2009) and whose origins in the rigidlylogical structures of computer text-processing beliethe organic metaphors of the visualization

Similarly TextArcrsquos choice to represent themicrotext as a circle invokes the longstanding sym-bolic connection in the Western tradition betweencircular forms and the concept of perfection orcompleteness Like the perfect circular orbits ofheavenly bodies in astronomy prior to Kepler orAntonio Panizzirsquos famous circular reading room inthe British Museum circular forms encompasscomplexity However one could read TextArcagainst the grain by looking at the ways it avoidsthe complexity of materials in the sublunary humanworld especially materials like Hamlet whose textsurvives in three authoritative yet incommensurableprinted versions not to mention its long history ofeditorial interventions and theatrical adaptations(Mowat 1988 Werstine 1988) None of this

material complexity is reflected in TextArcrsquos visual-ization which simply parses through one of ProjectGutenbergrsquos plain-text transcriptions and leaveseditorial issues unaddressed TextArcrsquos visualiza-tions are not really about Hamlet or Alice inWonderland or its other sample texts they areabout TextArcrsquos own algorithmic and aestheticcomplexity Yet TextArcrsquos greatest value mayappear when we stop wanting it to be a tool andsurrender up some unseen use-value Like many ofthe most enduring works in the arts and humanitieswe do not necessarily need to agree with TextArcrsquosunderlying assumptions in order to appreciate it asa spur to further work along similar lines The cap-acity to inspire should not be underestimated whenwe evaluate digital objects

The preceding examples are familiar kinds indigital humanities research especially in their reli-ance on text-processing but it is important not tohave too narrow a conception of what a prototypeobject can look like Our third example is Adrian

Fig 6 TextArc a visual text analysis tool as applied to Alicersquos Adventures in Wonderland showing inter-episodic use oflsquoRabbitrsquo and four foreshadowing references to lsquoQueenrsquo before the co-occurring character lsquoKingrsquo appears (reproducedwith permission from W Bradford Paley)

How a prototype argues

Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010 419

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

Cheokrsquos Poultry Internet (Fig 7) which is an at-tempt to produce a means for people to interactphysically with their pets at a distance This exampletests the limits of our analysis in a number of waysFirst it takes us outside the domain of visualizationand into the realm of interaction as fairly broadlydefined Second the design introduces not only newsoftware but also new hardware Third it entersinto an area of public debate namely animalrights in such a way as to highlight the differencesbetween conventional research concerns and whatmight be described as a form of action researchwhere the design has larger social implications

Cheok is making the following arguments

technology should be used to intervene in casesof previous inhumane action

technology should support animal-humanrelationships

technologies which support animal-human rela-tionships may also support relationships betweenhumans

warm-heartedness is a research objective

These points are contestable not everyone wouldagree with Cheokrsquos implicit arguments somemight agree with his premise but think of other

ways it could develop into an argumentative proto-type The Poultry Internet is explicitly a response tofactory farming as Cheok makes clear in his video[httpwwwyoutubecomwatchvfrac141x-8EzuMiqU(accessed 19 August 2010)] His user study partici-pants were not the people but rather the chickensThe research question was lsquoDid the chickens enjoywearing the jacketrsquo They apparently did choosingthe jacket 73 of the time From the field of animalstudies we recognize that chickens are iconic ani-mals in factory farming where they are similarlyhooked up to machines and remote feedback sys-tems The question is whether the prototype suc-cessfully subverts or instead reinforces culturalperceptions of chickens as mechanized organisms7

This question asks us to critically examine the de-tails of the implementation of the prototype with-out necessarily attacking the premise outlined in thepoints above and works in the inevitable gapmdashbigor smallmdashthat may exist between all intentions andimplementations

But is the premise itself defensible in the sensethat it is capable of being defended through argu-ment We would say perhaps not which is to saythat there are some issues where people are notreadily convinced by evidence and arguments nomatter what form those take Such is the differencebetween arguments and convictions Reasonablepeople subscribe to both and both in turn are re-flected in the prototypes that digital humanistsbuild

Finally the Poultry Internet does raise a substan-tive issuemdashsomething that is true of much of thework of Cheok and his team In the best spirit ofcritical design they remind us that artifacts doindeed have politics whether that artifact is achickenndashhuman interface a highway system anannotated page or an encoded text and correspond-ing visualization

7 Conclusion

All of the prototypes we have discussed here are alsotheories One theory is not necessarily as good as thenext but the digital humanities will surely benefitfrom recognizing the diversity of forms which

Fig 7 Adrian Cheokrsquos Poultry Internet is intended asa means of increasing good relations between peopleand their pets (httpwwwyoutubecomwatchvfrac141x-8EzuMiqU) This image shows Cheok with therooster Charlie who is wearing the jacket that allowshim to be petted remotely (reproduced with permissionfrom Adrian Cheok)

A Galey and S Ruecker

420 Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

theories and critical arguments may take Althoughscholars usually find themselves making cases fortheir work both in writing and in person traditionalgenres can limit the persuasiveness of argumentswhich take non-traditional formsmdashsuch as thePoultry Internet which is about as non-traditionalas we can imagine All too often intricate and dy-namic digital objects become flattened into screen-shots for the purposes of project reporting Wesuggest that prototyping as a critical process de-mands that we move beyond the binary inwhich written project reports become stand-insfor digital objects themselves in all their complex-ity and media-specificity This perspective re-quires us to learn to read digital objects criticallyrespecting their intellectual potential in the sameway that a peer-reviewer recognizes the potentialof an article book or grant applicationmdashkeepingin mind that recognition and approval are not thesame thing

Our argument also raises questions about how tosupport research which we have not explored hereShould a prototyping project be the only one of itskind which receives funding or is it best to have anumber of parallel projects working on the samequestions in different ways The utilitarian impulsemight prefer the former model but we imaginemore net gains in the form of a critical debateoccurring among prototypes from the latter If wewere to embrace the implications of this approachwe might call for example for funding programswhere three distinct teams working at different lo-cations were all to receive parallel funds to carry outthe same project Our prediction would be that theresults would be far richer in terms of the theoriesexpressed through prototyping than any we haveseen to date

Alternatively we might propose a more longitu-dinal form of funding that intentionally supports aseries of prototypes Projects of this kind couldmore readily form a trajectory over time withoutgaps in the middle of the process caused by thecurrent need to find distinct funds for each step inthe series This also sidesteps the possible negativeconnotations of reviewers correctly pointing outthat the work is not necessarily sufficiently originalat each step

There are also implications for crediting workFields like digital humanities book history anddesign tend to incorporate a plurality of attributionmodels borrowing aspects from the humanities sci-ences and creative arts though hopefully all wouldagree that proper attribution is a matter of ethicsDigital objects make the practical side of attributiontricky since it is standard practice for programmersto re-use code between projects and to incorporatecode libraries shared by others We also believe thatas the concept of design transferability finds evergreater support we will see a similarly increasingredeployment of design assets into families of proto-types More work on the question of attribution isneeded though the answer probably lies not inadopting a single disciplinary model but in under-standing design as a complex practice that does notwork the same way in all contexts We argue that ahelpful theoretical apparatus may be found inMcKenziersquos notion of the sociology of texts whichrecognizes the different kinds of agency at work inhuman artifacts collaborating and contesting witheach other to make meaning

As a way of thinking design positions us in apotent space between the past and the futureFailing to recognize design as a hermeneutic processmeans failing to understand how our inherited cul-tural record actually works Yet the other side of thecoin is the opportunity to understand how our owndesigns are part of a longer continuum than projectcycles normally prompt us to think about EvenUtopia could be regarded as an ongoing project incritical design in the sense that the complexity of itsdesign continues to provoke new interpretationsand debates Should digital artifacts not strive forthe same kind of interpretive afterlife Michel deCerteaursquos description of the paradox of historicalresearch applies equally well to the temporal orien-tations of design and book history in the digitalhumanities lsquofounded on the rupture between apast that is its object and a present that is theplace of its practice history endlessly finds the pre-sent in its object and the past in its practicersquo (1988p 36) Understanding how objects argue is one wayof responding to this rupture making a virtue of theentanglement of past and future intentions in anyhuman artifact

How a prototype argues

Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010 421

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences andHumanities Research Council of Canada

ReferencesAhlberg C and Shneiderman B (1994) The

Alphaslider A Compact and Rapid Selector ConferenceProceedings on Human factors in Computing SystemsCelebrating Interdependence Boston MA SIGCHIpp 365ndash71

Allen P R (1963) Utopia and European humanism Thefunction of the prefatory letters and verses Studies inthe Renaissance 10 91ndash107

Booth W G Colomb G G and Williams J M(2008) The Craft of Research 3rd edn ChicagoUniversity of Chicago Press

Bowers F (1959) Textual and Literary CriticismCambridge Cambridge University Press

Bringhurst R (2005) The Elements of Typographic Style3rd edn Vancouver Hartley amp Marks

Carlson D (1993) English Humanist Books Writers andPatrons Manuscript and Print 1475ndash1525 TorontoUniversity of Toronto Press

Cerquiglini B (1999) In Praise of the Variant A CriticalHistory of Philology trans Betsy Wing Baltimore JohnsHopkins University Press

de Certeau M (1988) The Writing of History trans TomConley New York Columbia University Press

Chow R and Ruecker S (2006) TransferabilitymdashAWonder on the Ground of Design Research Proceedingsof Wonderground Lisbon Portugal The DesignResearch Society pp 1ndash6

Darnton R (1984) Philosophers Trim the Tree ofKnowledge The Epistemological Strategy of theEncyclopedie In The Great Cat Massacre and OtherEpisodes in French Cultural History New York BasicBooks pp 191ndash214

DeRose S J Durand D G Mylonas E and Renear AH (1990) What Is Text Really Journal of Computingin Higher Education 1(2) 3ndash26

Dunne A (2005) Hertzian Tales Electronic ProductsAesthetic Experience and Critical Design 2nd ednCambridge MA MIT Press

Fitzpatrick K (2009) Planned ObsolescencePublishing Technology and the Future of the Academy

New York NYU Press [Forthcoming accessed in openpeer review version at httpmediacommonsfuture-ofthebookorgmcpressplannedobsolescence (accessed19 August 2010)]

Galey A Cunningham R Nelson B Siemens R andWerstine P and the INKE Team (forthcoming)Beyond Remediation The Role of Textual Studies inImplementing New Knowledge Environments InNelson B and Terras M (eds) Digitizing MaterialCulture from Antiquity to 1700 Toronto amp TempeAZ IterArizona Centre for Medieval and RenaissanceStudies np

Gaver W W Beaver J and Benford S (2003)Designing Design Ambiguity as a Resource for DesignProceedings of the Conference on Human Factors inComputing Systems Ft Lauderdale FL ACM Press2003

Giacometti A Ruecker S Craig I Derksen G andRadzikowska M Introducing the Ripper Interface forText Collections Paper presented at the CanadianSymposium on Text Analysi (CaSTA) ConferenceNew Directions in Text Analysis A Joint HumanitiesComputing Computer Science Conference atUniversity of Saskatchewan Saskatoon October16ndash18 2008

Grafton A (2009) Worlds Made by Words Scholarshipand Community in the Modern West Cambridge MAHarvard University Press

Gibson R W (1961) St Thomas More A PreliminaryBibliography New Haven CT Yale University Press

Haraway D J (2008) When Species Meet MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Harris R L (2000) Information Graphics A Comprehen-sive Illustrated Reference Oxford Oxford UniversityPress

Hayles N K (2005) My Mother Was a Computer DigitalSubjects and Literary Texts Chicago University ofChicago Press

Helmer-Poggenpohl S (1999) Design MovesApproximating a Desired Future with Users ConferenceProceedings on Design and the Social Sciences MakingConnections Edmonton AB Department of Art andDesign University of Alberta

Hinman C (1963) The Printing and Proof-Readingof the First Folio of Shakespeare 2 vols OxfordClarendon

Howsam L (2006) Old Books and New Histories AnOrientation to Studies in Books and Print CultureToronto University of Toronto Press

A Galey and S Ruecker

422 Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

Jardine L (1993) Erasmus Man of Letters The

Construction of Charisma in Print Princeton NJ

Princeton University Press

Johns A (1998) The Nature of the Book Print and

Knowledge in the Making Chicago University of

Chicago Press

Kinney A F (2005) Utopiarsquos First Readers In

Honselaars T and Kinney A (eds) Challenging

Humanism Essays in Honor of Dominic Baker-Smith

Newark NJ University of Delaware Press pp 23ndash53

Kronick D A (2004) lsquoDevant le Delugersquo and Other Essays

on Early Modern Scientific Communication Lanham

MD Scarecrow Press

Leslie M (1998) Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of

History Ithaca NY Cornell University Press

Manovich L (2007) QampA Session at the Digital

Humanities (DH) 2007 Conference Urbana-

Champaign IL June 2007

Massai S (2007) Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor

Cambridge MA Cambridge University Press

Mayr E (1976) Evolution and the Diversity of Life Selected

Essays Cambridge MA Harvard University Press

McCarty W (2008) Whatrsquos Going On Literary and

Linguistic Computing 23(3) 253ndash61

McGann J J (1983) A Critique of Modern Textual Criti-

cism Charlottesville VA University Press of Virginia

McGann J J (1991) The Textual Condition Princeton

NJ Princeton University Press

McGann J J (2001) Radiant Textuality Literature

After the World Wide Web New York Palgrave

Macmillan

McKenzie D F (1999) Bibliography and the Sociology

of Texts Cambridge MA Cambridge University Press

McKenzie D F (2002) Typography and Meaning The

Case of William Congreve In McDonald P D and

Suarez M (eds) Making Meaning lsquoPrinters of the

Mindrsquo and Other Essays Amherst MA University of

Massachusetts Press pp 198ndash236

Moxon J (1683) Mechanick Exercises Or the Doctrine of

Handy-works Applied to the Art of Printing London

Mowat B (1988) The Form of Hamletrsquos Fortunes

Renaissance Drama [new ser] 19 97ndash126

Paley W B (2002) TextArc An alternate way to view a

text httpwwwtextarcorg (accessed 19 August

2010)

Paredes-Olea M Ruecker S Fiorentino C and

Forbes F (2008) Using an Affordance Strength

Approach to Study the Possible Redeployment of

Designs for Decision Support Visualization Paper

Presented at the 9th Advances in Qualitative Methods

Conference 2008 Banff AB October 2008

Posavec S (2007) Literary Organism httpwwwitsbeen

realcouk (accessed 19 December 2010)

Rand P (1985) Paul Rand A Designerrsquos Art New Haven

CT Yale University Press

Ratto M (2009) Critical Making Conceptual and

Material Studies in Technology and Social Life Paper

Presented at Hybrid Design Practices workshop

Ubicomp 2009 Orlando FL

Ratto M and Hockema S (2009) Flwr Pwr Tending

the Walled Garden In Dekker A and Wolfsberger A

(eds) Walled Garden The Netherlands Virtueel

Platform httpwwwvirtueelplatformnlen2780

Renear A (1997) Out of Praxis Three (Meta)Theories

of Textuality In Sutherland K (ed) Electronic Text

Investigations in Method and Theory Oxford

Clarendon Press pp 107ndash26

Roberts-Smith J Gabriele S Ruecker S Sinclair S

Bouchard M DeSouza-Coelho S Kong A

Lam D and Rodriguez R (2009) The Text and the

Line of Action Re-conceiving Watching the Script

Proceedings of the INKE 2009 Birds of a Feather

Conference Victoria BC October 2009

Robinson P (2009) What Text Really Is Not and Why

Editors Have to Learn to Swim Literary and Linguistic

Computing 24(1) 41ndash52

Rockwell G What Is Text Analysis Really Literary and

Linguistic Computing 18(2) 209ndash19

Ruecker S (2006) Proposing an Affordance Strength

Model to Study New Interface Tools Paper Presented

at the Digital Humanities 2006 Conference at the

Sorbonne Paris July 2006

Ruecker S Sinclair S and Radzikowska M (2007)

Confidence Visual Research and the Aesthetic

Function Partnership the Canadian Journal of Library

and Information Practice and Research 2(1) http

journallibuoguelphcaindexphpperj (accessed 19

August 2010)

Sengers P and Gaver W (2006) Staying Open to

Interpretation Engaging Multiple Meanings in Design

and Evaluation Proceedings of the 6th ACM

Conference on Designing Interactive Systems

University Park PA ACM pp 99ndash108

Siemens R Warwick C Cunningham R Dobson T

Galey A Ruecker S Schreibman S and the INKE

How a prototype argues

Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010 423

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from

Team (2009) Codex Ultor Toward a Conceptual andTheoretical Foundation for New Research on Booksand Knowledge Environments Spec issue of DigitalStudies Le champ numerique 1(2) ed John Bonnetand Kevin Kee httpwwwdigitalstudiesorgojsindexphpdigital_studiesarticleview177220 (accessed 19August 2010) Conjointly published in French asCodex Ultor Vers une base conceptuelle et theoriquepour la nouvelle recherche sur les livres et les environ-nements documentaires Memoires du livre Studies inBook Culture 1(1) (2009) httpwwweruditorgrevuememoires2009v1n1 (accessed 19 August2010)

Sinclair S Bradley J Ramsay S Rockwell GSiemens R and Guedon J-C (2003) Peer Reviewof Humanities Computing Software Panel at TheAssociation for Computers and the Humanities TheAssociation for Literary and Linguistic Computing(ALLCACH) The 2003 Joint InternationalConference Athens Georgia May 29ndashJune 2 2008Draft articles online at httptadamcmastercaMainPeerReviewCluster (accessed 19 August 2010)

Stoddard R (1987) Morphology and the Book from anAmerican Perspective Printing History 9(17) 2ndash14

Tischendorf C (1867) When Were Our Gospels WrittenAn Argument by Constantine Tischendorf with aNarrative of the Discovery of the Sinaitic Manuscript2nd edn London The Religious Tract Society

Tufte E R (1997) Visual Explanations Images andQuantities Evidence and Narrative Cheshire CTGraphics Press

Unsworth J (2000) Scholarly Primitives What MethodsDo Humanities Researchers Have in Common andHow Might Our Tools Reflect This httpwww3isrlillinoiseduunsworthKings5-00primitiveshtml(accessed 19 August 2010)

Vallee J-F (2004) The Fellowship of the Book PrintedVoices and Written Friendships in Morersquos Utopia InHeitsch D and Vallee J-F (eds) Printed Voices TheRenaissance Culture of Dialogue Toronto University ofToronto Press pp 42ndash62

Werstine P (1988) The Textual Mystery of HamletShakespeare Quarterly 39(1) 1ndash26

Wooden W W and Wall J N (1985) Thomas Moreand the Painterrsquos Eye Visual Perspective and ArtisticPurpose in Morersquos Utopia Journal of Medieval andRenaissance Studies 15 231ndash63

Winner L (1980) Do Artifacts Have Politics Daedalus109(1) 121ndash36

Notes1 A complete list of INKE team members and partners

may be found at inkeca We are grateful to EmilyMonks-Leeson the audience at Digital Humanities2009 and especially John Bradley for their commentson an early version of this paper

2 For a similar approach see Matthew Rattorsquos CriticalMaking Lab at the University of Torontorsquos iSchoolhttpwwwcriticalmakingcom (accessed 19 August2010) See also Ratto 2009 and Ratto and Hockema2009

3 We are grateful to Katherine Rowe for bringing theMediaCommons project to our attention It shouldbe emphasized that all references to PlannedObsolescence appearing here refer to a draft undergoingopen peer review the published version may changesubstantially

4 To be precise there were two 1518 editions of Utopiapublished by John Froben in Basel one in March andthe other in November The differences between thetwo are negligible for the purposes of this discussionA thorough collation of Utopiarsquos changing paratextsmay be found in Gibson 1961

5 For a similar critical reading of the forms of concord-ances themselves and the assumptions they embodysee Rockwell 2003

6 For an example of the debate over cladistics (alsoknown as phylogenetics) see Mayr 1976 pp 433ndash78on stemmatics see McGann 1983 on Diderot andDrsquoAlembertrsquos tree of knowledge see Darnton 1984

7 For an analysis of interactions between humans tech-nologies and particular species see Haraway 2008esp her chapter lsquolsquoChickenrsquorsquo (pp 265ndash74)

A Galey and S Ruecker

424 Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 25 No 4 2010

at University of V

ictoria on March 12 2015

httpllcoxfordjournalsorgD

ownloaded from