Announcing a New Platform for Collaborative Scholarship of E-lit

Announcing ACLS Workbench: A new site for collaborative research.
Site: http://scalar.usc.edu/aclsworkbench

ACLS Workbench Tour from Mark Marino on Vimeo.

ACLS Workbench is a new platform for collaborative research, which enables scholars to create, join, or clone online arguments enhanced with multimedia content.

http://scalar.usc.edu/aclsworkbench

ACLS Workbench has two novel features: the “join” feature and the “clone” feature. The join features allows new collaborators to apply to join your research project. The clone feature allows scholars to copy entire books so they can build their own interpretations.

ACLS Workbench is built on the ANVC Scalar platform, which offers special affordances for presenting multimedia content and custom hyperlinked paths through material. Combined with features to annotate video and code along with Workbench’s affordances, this new platform offers a powerful tool for collaboration. (Video introduction of the site: http://youtu.be/twMliWAt5KA )

As a demonstration of Workbench, we are launching Reading Project, the online companion to our recent book: Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit just published by University of Iowa Press.

http://scalar.usc.edu/aclsworkbench/reading-project/

The book offers a collaborative investigation of one work of digital literature, modeling an argument for more intensive collaboration in the digital humanities by combining scholars who draw their methodologies from visual analytics, Critical Code Studies, media archaeology and others. The ACLS Workbench site presents our arguments and findings in an online multimedia format. Crucially, future scholars may clone our online book and use its assets to build new arguments.

The book argues: “Collaboration can produce understandings that are greater than the sum of their parts. Conversely, collaboration can foster new ways of understanding what we do as critics, scholars, and readers. Such reflection and innovation is vital not only to literary criticism but also to the future of the humanities more generally” (137). Workbench was designed to present and promote these collaborations.

ACLS Workbench was designed by Jessica Pressman (San Diego State U), Mark C Marino (USC), and Jeremy Douglass (UCSB) as part of an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship in collaboration with Lucas Miller, Craig Dietrich, and Erik Loyer. The platform is online and freely available. The demonstration book Reading Project was developed with the kind permission of William Poundstone and the assistance of Elizabeth Shayne.

Contact Us:

Jessica Pressman, jessicapressman0 at gmail
Mark Marino, markcmarino at gmail
Jeremy Douglass, jeremydouglass at gmail

For more on Scalar, see: http://scalar.usc.edu

Posted in