SmartTexts and SEEM

Goals of the Project

We aim to create a viable Scholarly Electronic Edition Machine (SEEM) with the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript so that users can:

• Learn how to use a SEEM SmartText with selfcontained documentation
• Author a selfcontained electronic edition of a text, be it a "born-digital" new text or an edition of another text
• Annotate their text and manage the annotations
• Tag their text so that it can find others and tag parts of it so that the document can recombine for different purposes
• Export their text in a "dumb" XML format like RSS or TEI
• Set the text to publish itself
• Search their text and Analyze their text using both built-in and remote text analysis tools

Above all, users should be able to do all this without any tools other than an agreeable browser while having the functionality of a server supported environment.

Progress

Meeting Notes

• June 2, 2009 Geoffrey, Stan, Garry, Megan, Kamal, Peter
• May 21, 2009 Geoffrey, Peter, Stan, Megan, Kamal
• May 7, 2009 Geoffrey, Peter, Susan, Stan, Garry, Megan, Kamal
• April 30, 2009 Geoffrey, Peter, Megan, Kamal
• April 23, 2009 Geoffrey, Stan, Megan, Kamal, Garry
• April 16, 2009 Geoffrey, Stan, Peter, Kamal, Garry
• April 9, 2009 Geoffrey, Stan, Peter, Megan, Garry
• April 2, 2009 Geoffrey, Stan, Kamal, Peter, Megan, Susan

• March 26, 2009 Geoffrey, Stan, Kamal, Peter, Megan, Garry
• March 19, 2009 Geoffrey, Stan, Kamal, Peter, Megan
• March 17, 2009 Geoffrey, Stan, Kamal, Peter, Megan
• March 12, 2009 Geoffrey, Stan, Kamal, Peter, Megan, Garry
• March 5, 2009 Geoffrey, Stan, Kamal, Peter, Susan, Megan
• February 26, 2009 Geoffrey, Stan, Garry, Kamal, Peter
• February 19, 2009 Geoffrey, Stan, Megan, Kamal, Peter
• February 12, 2009 Geoffrey, Stan, Susan, Megan, Kamal, Peter
• February 5, 2009 Stan, Kamal, Peter
• February 3, 2009 Geoffrey, Peter
• January 29, 2009 Geoffrey, Stan, Megan, and Peter
• January 20, 2009 Geoffrey, Stan and Peter
• January 17, 2009 Susan and Peter

• December 11, 2008 Stan, Peter
• December 3, 2008 Stan, Geoffrey, Peter
• November 24, 2008^? Stan, Geoffrey, Peter, Julianna
• November 11, 2008 Stan, Geoffrey, Peter
• November 5, 2008 Stan, Geoffrey, Peter
• October 29, 2008 Stan, Geoffrey, Peter
• October 7, 2008 Stan, Geoffrey, Peter
• October 3, 2008 Stan, Geoffrey, Peter, Susan
• September 30, 2008 Stan, Geoffrey, Peter
• September 29, 2008 Peter's Notes

• June 27th Meeting with Peter, Lian, and Geoffrey

FlashTAT

• The Flash Text Analysis Tools grew out of this project.

General

• Global Definition is a definition of a smartText suitable for depositing Globalization documents.

Possible roadmap

• Interactive Panel - Word Count
  • A flash panel that will submit the current page state to Taporware and return the results within the page. This self-contained page functionality will both serve as the base of the project's TAPOR connectivity and it's spiritual
• Standards-based text viewing
  • Text displayed in a SEEM text will be probably be organized, in the backend, using TEI Lite.
• Modularity
  • In making documents more modular, they be more fully separated into objects, and able to be recombined in customizeable ways. For example, akin to MediaWiki^?, a document can be split up into sub-category objects and recombined by simple references.
• TEI Lite import
  • Ability to import a TEI XML text into an object.
• Basic text editing
  • Ability to create and save simple texts within the SmartText, using HTML syntax. In this early stage, the title, date, and body will be implemented.
• Style states
  • Allow objects to be displayed in either an editing state or a published state
• Fragment identifier implementation
  • Show different states of the document based on the URI.
  • e.g. http://www.example.com/#edit/document1 would link specifically to the editing interface for "document1", while http://www.example.com/#publish/document1 would link to a published version of the same text
• TEI Lite export
  • Ability to export TEI Lite files.
• Tags and Tag-based Recombination
  • The ability to add semantic keywords to objects, and to display a page state organized by those tags.
• Advanced Panels
• Search
  • within document
  • within set of documents
• Other Future Features
  • RSS Import, RSS Export, Attractive Design, Image Support, Style customization from within the document

What's the Idea?

That we give the community that doesn't have access to well configured servers a viable SmartText that seems to have all the editing, publishing, and analysis features of a server-supported text analysis and publishing environment.

What's in a Gift?

We need an alternative between doing things ourselves and pursuing grants to do things. What about a consensual giving? A gift is the work of givers who see that they have the skills to help others. In the giving they discover something together. Do you want to give to this project? Here is how:

• Figure out the state of the project and the goals of the project.
• Identify something you can give to this project and talk with the rest of us about it.
• Create a page linked to this page under the About Contributors section that introduces you and describes what you want to give to the project so that the rest of us can work with you.
• Do something and celebrate.

What needs to be done and who is doing it?

Here is a preliminary idea of what needs to be done:

• We need a code versioning system set up so that versions of SEEM can be
• We need a discussion list set up to discuss what SEEMs to be
• We need specifications written for SEEM 1.0
• We need the base code written so that modules can be added
• We need someone who knows about software engineering to rewrite this list of things to be done.

Background

What background documents and ideas are relevant to this project?

Recombinant Documents

Greg Crane is What Do You Do with a Million Books? talks about "recombinant documents" that can learn from each other (through automated mining and linking) and can learn from their users. Crane is looking at the large scale and imagining a document publishing system that is on a server and which can do the mining and user tracking to add intelligence to the documents. SmartText looks at the individual text and asks what we can build into a text so that it can recombine itself and others.

UFOs (Ubiquitous Findable Objects)

Ubiquitous Findable Objects is a term coined by Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, for an emerging type of object that can communicate its location, personal information, and purpose so that it can be found. In an exploding information universe we need to endow certain documents with the metadata and intelligence so that they can be found appropriately and so that they can find what they are needed for. Such documents could have the properties of a computer worm - the ability to duplicate and transmit themselves.

HyperPo

Stéfan Sinclair's HyperPo project gives us a rich example of what the interface to a smart text might look like. Sinclair has developed ideas about "HyperPoets" which are smaller primitive processes that can be run on a text. Sinclair has also developed a powerful markup language for text analysis, TAML. See Toward Next Generation Text Analysis Tools: The Text Analysis Markup Language (TAML). TAML documents can carry their history with them, including the original text and sequence of analytical operations performed.

TAPoRware

http://taporware.mcmaster.ca is a collection of text analysis tools that work through a CGI interface or Web Service interface. (See TAPoRware Online Documentation for information about the interfaces.) There is a TAPoRware Tool Bar which is a collection of HTML, CSS, and Javascript that can be embedded into a web page to provide built in analytical functionality. SEEM came from a reflection about whether we could combine a TiddlyWiki with the TAPoRware Tool Bar.

OpenDOC

As Geoffrey reminds, the concept behind Apple's OpenDOC compound document format lends some inspiration to the idea of combining embedded snippets of functionality based on the function of a document. Check out this video for a fun look back at Apple's marketing vision for OpenDoc.

About Contributors

We need your help! Get a TADA account and add your name.

Geoffrey Rockwell

Geoffrey Rockwell made up the silly name SEEM instead of doing what he was supposed to do. He thought first to call it FiddlyWiki, but that didn't seem right. He started inviting people to join this project and hopes someone does.

Shawn Day

Shawn Day appreciates the silliness of the name and continues to like the concept of TiddlyWikis^? and tools such SIMILE's Timeline and Exhbit that allow for the sharing knowledge online with a minimum of fuss. I think that we need to start small and demonstrate where we can go the concept of a SmartText. I'm there to do what I can. Let's start to build something.

Peter Organisciak

Peter Organisciak got pulled into this project by Geoffrey and Shawn, but his infatuation with TiddlyWiki^? has lasted for years. He's fascinated with XML and JSON, and thus is most interested in the possibilities of internal modularity within SEEM documents. He's trying to figure out how to explain this project to his mom.