Screenshots

Current Functionality

• Create Collections, Texts, and Authors (and automatically add yourself as a Reader on login through Facebook)
• Associate Texts with Collections and Authors with Texts
• Tag Texts, Collections, and Authors
• Browse Tags in multiple formats, and by All, Collection, Author, and Text groups
• Browse your own records from Home, and browse others contributions in the Collections, Authors, and Texts sections, or through their Reader profile
• Add Collections and Texts added by other Readers to your own

Development Notes

Trac

Bug Reports

Feature Requests

Current Screenshots (as of February 2008)

Early Screenshots (November-December 2007)

• Advanced text analysis on My Texts data set (data mining, scraping, etc.) A job for JiTR.

Development Notes

Overview

For a full overview of the project, see the Proposal.

The first development push on Digital Texts is designed to produce a working prototype application using the Facebook Platform. Facebook offers advantages over competing social networks (Friendster, MySpace, the group organized under Google's OpenSocial), as it is more popular, and has a more mature Development Platform.

Availability

Presently, only Developers of the application (Stéfan and Johnny) can add and view the Digital Texts 2.0 Facebook application. However, after a bit more development, this will be opened up to allow others to add and begin using it.

Within Facebook, the app currently resides at: http://apps.facebook.com/digitaltexts/.

Or, on its own on Tapor Dev at: http://tapor1-dev.mcmaster.ca/~dt2/facebook/digital_texts/

You'll notice that some of the content is missing on the Tapor version. FBML (Facebook Markup Language) calls such as:

Hi <fb:name firstnameonly="true" uid="<?=$user?>" useyou="false"/>!

only work within the Facebook interface. You can get the same information externally, but you need to use API calls to get it:

$user_info = $facebook->api_client->users_getInfo($user, "first_name");
$first_name = $user_info[0]["first_name"];
echo "Hi " . $first_name . "!";

Roadmap

Current Status: Milestone 0.25

Milestone 1

• Ability for users to add, edit, and delete Collections and Texts, which are implicitly linked to Author objects in the database
• Add notes to Collections and Texts
• Associate Texts with Collections
• Add Metadata and bibliographic information to Texts (URL, format, publication information, language, copyright, etc)
• Tagging of Texts, Collections, and Authors, and the ability to see tags on others' texts
• Visualizations of these tags (tag clouds ...other forms?)
• Some statistics/visualizations based on human associations of texts (gender, age, etc. of reader and author matches). This is where Facebook's social graph comes into play.
• Some initial templates for broadcasting Digital Texts activity to your Friends ("Godfrey added 'Critique of Pure Reason' to his 'Favourites' Collection. See this Collection.", etc)

Milestone 2

• Ability to create and join Text Groups. These might be organized around Purpose (reading for pleasure, research group, for commercial use), Interest (a specific genre, period, etc of work), Topic (WWII Era Swing Music), Author (Bertrand Russell), and so on. Functionality to invite others to these groups, set privacy (for research settings), etc.
• Basic text analysis on My Texts data set (via integration with Tapor).
• More advanced/user-definable statistics based on human associations (hybrid searches based on author/reader, etc)
• Ability to import texts from desktop PDF/article-management software (such as Endnote)

Milestone 3 (Blue Sky)

• "Load Collection in Tapor", "Load Collection in Monk Workbench" type functionality
• Advanced text analysis on My Texts data set (data mining, scraping, etc.) A job for [[http://tada.mcmaster.ca/Main/JiTR][JiTR].

Screenshots

Early prototype of the Digital Texts 2.0 interface within the Facebook Canvas

Early prototype of the Digital Texts 2.0 interface external to the Facebook Canvas (missing several features)

Add Text Form

Add Collection Form

Narrow column profile view

Database Model

Links

• Official Facebook Development Documentation
• Facebook Developers Wiki
• Getting Started with Facebook Application Development: A good Tucows tutorial that I found helpful when I started the project.
• Facebook PHP Tutorial: Another tutorial I referenced.
• rFacebook API for Ruby on Rails

-- JohnnyRodgers - 22 Nov 2007