Viral Analytics: Embedding Voyeur into Web Frameworks
Summary Description
Mashups (the recombination of content and functionality from multiple online sources) are one of the defining characteristics of
Web 2.0. The underlying principle is clear: the value of content can be greatly enhanced by allowing it to interact directly with content from elsewhere, especially when the user is able to drive the process. Mashups are so prevalent on the web today that we may hardly noticed them, from a site with aggregated Facebook and Twitter feeds to travel information sites with real-time traffic, weather and points of interest data.
Voyeur is a web-based text analysis environment that has been designed to allow for mashups and integration into remote sites (the same way
YouTube? videos can be embedded into just about any web page). The ability to embed Voyeur represents a significant advancement in the development of online text analysis tools such as
HyperPo and Taporware. It is currently possible to drop a Voyeur panel into an arbitrary page and to access the dynamic analytic features of Voyeur. The primary purpose of this project is to move beyond a simple ad-hoc integration of Voyeur tools and allow content providers to fully integrate Voyeur into various web frameworks that are commonly used by digital humanists.
In order to accomplish integration of Voyeur with web frameworks, we need to better understand what frameworks are used by digital humanists and why. We know anecdotally of several projects using
WordPress? (the prevalent open source blogging platform), Drupal (a widely-used open source content management system), and OJS (an open source journal management and publishing system), but we lack a clear understanding of just how wide-spread each of the major frameworks is as well as which secondary frameworks are used. Studying usage patterns will allow us to determine where to focus our efforts. We also anticipate that a survey of web frameworks in the digital humanities would be greatly beneficial to researchers considering the various technologies and wishing to know what other projects have adopted and why.
A second component of the research is to examine the technical challenges of integrating Voyeur into the various web frameworks: each one has its own database format, module architecture, content organization, etc. For each web framework we need to determine the scope of work that would need to be done, as well as identify potential issues in supporting and maintaining custom Voyeur modules.
In addition to the survey of web frameworks and a report on technical specificities, we will prototype integration with three strategic partners:
Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ),
Digital Studies / Champs numérique, and the
McMaster Library who is interested in experimenting with integration of Voyeur into its front-end interface. Should our efforts at building Voyeur modules with these collaborators prove fruitful, we will have an opportunity to reach a wide audience of potential users. We also anticipate that the availability of modules for widely-used open source frameworks will generate additional interest in text analytics.
Project Description
Technologies
Describe Voyeur and embedding technologies
Describe Web Frameworks:
- OJS
- Endeca
- Cocoon
- Agora
- WordPress?
- Drupal
- Moodle
Methodologies
- develop and test modules: OJS, Endeca, Cocoon, Agora, WordPress?, Drupal, Moodle
- modify Voyeur to support frameworks, especially to support incremental updates of corpora
- analyze web logs for spreading patterns of usage
- ask content providers how they found the modules (an existing installation, module repositories, our documentation, etc.)
Timeline
References
Budget
$27k 1/2 Postdoc at
McMaster
$18k 1 1/2 RA at Alberta
$5k travel
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StefanSinclair - 31 Aug 2009
