The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory: Infrastructure Development through Partnership

The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory: Infrastructure Development through Partnership
Brown, Susan, University of Guelph, Canada, sbrown@uoguelph.ca
This poster will outline the strategies for the collaborative infrastructure development, still in progress, of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (www.cwrc.ca), and the results of these strategies to date. This project is funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation to provide an open web-based environment to foster the use of digital tools and resources for literary studies in and about Canada. At this point when Canada’s literary heritage is moving online, management of information about Canadian literary and cultural history still relies on tools derived from print models, which cannot accommodate the explosion of online materials. CWRC is predicated on the assumption that literary studies will increasingly shift from the model of solitary scholars working on small groups of texts, towards working in increasingly collaborative research environments, whether as individuals or in teams, on larger sets of texts. Its infrastructure is designed to help literary scholars make better use of digital tools in their use by providing an online environment developed in response to current research in the scholarly community.

CWRC is designed around partnerships, whether one is referring to: system components; the aggregation and federation of primary and secondary materials; or the scholarly activity for which the infrastructure is designed. This project’s infrastructure is a combination of computing hardware, software, and personnel to deploy a unique platform, a collaboratory, comprised of two major elements, a database and a toolkit, linked through a web-based service-oriented architecture. This poster outlines the key partnerships built into CWRC’s development plan, using visual diagrams to communicate both the system architecture and the various types of partners and the relationships CWRC has with the various partners involved in the project.

The infrastructure will launch with its repository database, Online Research Canada, or ORCA, already populated with a body of open access “seed” data contributed by partners from existing data currently residing in silos. Some of these projects are long-finished and some ongoing. Federation of data in related partner projects will expand the body of initial materials, giving the Collaboratory both a set of materials on which to test its functionality and a critical mass of data necessary to demonstrate the potential of the new research environment to scholars. A number of partnerships with contributing and pilot projects will ensure that further data is ingested while the technical infrastructure is in its early development stages.

The CWRC environment will be designed to empower online modes of research and collaboration for a community that is not well versed in such collaboration. Anticipated components of the CWRC toolkit include: tools to edit and annotate materials in and (in the case of annotating) beyond ORCA; aids to discovery, mining, and visualization of data; and collaboration and social networking tools. However, with the exception of search engines, none of these tools have been adopted broadly within the community of literary scholars, so partnering with scholars to assess various tools and select amongst

the various possibilities is key. A new scholars group will be crucial to ensuring that we anticipate as far as possible the needs of digital adepts, as well as those of established scholars. Partnerships with established tool providers such as the TAPoR portal and with research projects prototyping second-generation tools for literary studies are key to ensuring the right balance of well-tested and emergent tools. More diffuse partnerships such as use of open-source software are also fundamental to the design of this project. CWRC is extremely fortunate to be partnering with researchers in computing science and other technical fields in the development of some crucial areas such as role and workflow management, social networking, and search, federation, and data mining.

Interface will be a major challenge, since its design will likely have a greater impact than anything else on the degree of scholarly adoption. Our strategy here is to develop first the fundamental components of the system—the repository, the editor, and a role and workflow management system—with very minimal interfaces, and then to work with scholars in our contributing and pilot projects to develop an interface in response to user needs, through an iterative process.

One final, essential element in our infrastructure development is working towards long-term sustainability for the data that scholars will be entrusting to CWRC. Partnership with our host institution’s research library for long-term data curation and preservation is fundamental to that planning, and has had a shaping impact on our infrastructure development.

The poster will outline the results so far of this development strategy, since we will by the time of DH2011 be in the thick of development work. In so doing it will assess the challenges and advantages associated with CWRC’s partner-oriented strategy in relation to each of these areas, and assess the impact of this approach on both infrastructure planning and progress to date.

References:
Sample of literature that will be used to contextualize this poster
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Borgman, Christine L. “The Digital Future is Now: A Call to Action for the Humanities, ” Digital Humanities Quarterly, Forthcoming

Cunningham, Leigh “The Librarian as Digital Humanist: The Collaborative Role of the Research Library in Digital Humanities Projects, ” University of Toronto Faculty of Information Quarterly, 2.2 2010

Deegan, Marilyn 2006 Text Editing in a Digital Environment Follow-up Seminar Report AHRC ICT Methods Network

Hughes, Lorna Digital Tools Development for the Arts and Humanities Report AHRC ICT Methods Network

Martin, Shawn Digital Scholarship and Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities: Lessons from the Text Creation Partnership Journal of Electronic Publishing 10 1 January 2007

Siemens, Lynne ‘It's a team if you use “reply all” ’: An exploration of research teams in digital humanities environments Literary and Linguistic Computing2009

Sustainability of Digital Resources in the Arts and Humanities Expert Seminar Papers AHRC ICT Methods Network

Ragaz, Sharon Text Editing in a Digital Environment Rapporteur's Report AHRC ICT Methods Network

Unsworth, John Our Cultural Commonwealth: The report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences New YorkALCS 2006

Zorich, Diane M. A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States Prepared for the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) 2007, 2008