DigitalTexts2.0 User Stories
User Story 1: Academic Researcher
Laetitia is an undergraduate student in literary studies at the University of Guelph.
She is struggling to appreciate Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and wonders who else has faced similar problems. Her professor has assigned the text and she finds it rather obtuse.
Her professor has made the text available online through DigitalTexts2.0. She has been reading the text with increasing frustration. She then notes that there is a button available labeled annotations (Suddenly this sounds so very Lewis Carroll).
Laetitia discovers that other readers in her course are facing similar frustration and they have chosen to add annotations to the text asking questions, suggesting interpretations and drawing parallels to other online texts.
Laetitia starts to add some of her own questions and to suggest her feelings about questions asked by others. Soon thereafter, her discussion moves to the extended discussion area of DT2.0 with other students and researchers working with this and similar texts. One of the paths to further understanding suggested by a colleague are some of the text analysis tools which are embedded in DT2.0 which she can run against the online text.
Emboldened by the collegial encouragement, she appreciates that a couple of the tools are highlighted as a potentially good starting point for use with this text. She clicks on the first which created a wordCloud of the chapter which she is reading. Without any further input, the tool returns a wordCloud with the most popular options selected by default. Laetitia is sore amazed. Despite the fact that the only other time she has seen a wordCloud is on one her friends FaceBook page, she immediately grasps the fact that this could be a very valuable tool to help her consider Pynchon's work from an academic perspective.
Using DigitalTexts2/0 she is able to annotate specific areas of the text with her questions and thoughts and other participants respond within the text itself and contribute their own thoughts. She is also able to use TAPoRware text tools to explore the digital text for themes and motifs. She begins to consider herself a canny researcher by following the enhanced text analysis recipes that appear as a sidebar based on her level of expertise and the context of the text being explored.
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User Story 2: Thinktanker
Henry is a researcher with the Textual Interfaces Group (TIGTag) at JCN.
He is interested in exploring researchers use new practises such as social networks to work with text in a collaborative environment.
He uses DigitalTexts2.0 to explore relationships between users and the evolution of discourse amongst these users. He accomplishes this by analysing multiple discussions through RSS feeds of DigitalTexts2.0 discussion threads. He pipes these feeds into the ManyEyes visualization tool, which has been integrated into the DigitalTexts2.0 Open toolbox. Using this material, he is able to chart social networks as well as chart discourses visually as chromoagrams.
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User Story 3: Graduate Communications Studies Student
a graduate student is taking an introductory course in text analysis and uses DT2 to better understand how to frame questions in ways that are compatible with what tools allow
Mike is an graduate student in communication studies at the University of Southern California.
He is taking an introductory course in Text Analysis.
He needs to understand what tools are capable of.
Using the e!DigitalTexts2.0 he explores the variety of tools that are suggested by DT2.0 and is able to appreciate other users experience with the tools through discussions and annotations.
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User Story 4: Casual Researcher
Margaret is the daughter of Fred Smyth a writer of some renown during the 1950's.
She is interested in finding out what people have had to say about her father and more specifically in how comments, critiques and interest can be connected to the demographic attributes of those commenting.
She uses DigitalTexts2.0 to collect annotations and discussion topics about hyer father. She then cross-references these with publicly available demographic adata about those users and inputs this information into the MEyes WhizbangTool? that gives her a three-imensional dispaly of Age/Sex/PositiveNegative Appreciation value in a series of charts. This enables her to discover that...
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