James,
The economics, of course, is key. Wikis, except for the Wikipedia, don't write themselves and professional academics have very little incentive to contribute to a commons unless it in some way furthers their status and/or careers.
We tend to see this as a negative thing--terrible academics, keeping knowledge from us--but in fact I think at any rate that it is a real reflection of the cost of the research. I've been working for ages on a history of medievalist fonts for our wiki--or rather wanted to work on it for ages--but after the easy pickings were done, it has become increasingly difficult to put off other research projects to do the real slogging. If this was an article for PMLA or Speculum, I'd find the time.
And I run the DM wiki! If the owners find it difficult to get the time (and between you and me, I think we must be responsible for about 80% of what's there), it is even more difficult for those who can't point later to the general flourishing of the whole enterprise as a personal success.
Interestingly, I have been putting some effort into an article for the Wikipedia... but they assign the equivalent of gold stars for featured articles which is what I'm trying to get. Before that became a possibility, I didn't do the basic stuff we do to finish an article (checking references are exactly in the right style, and the like). And my contribution was purely parasitical. Having just written a book on Caedmon and his Hymn, I could pretty much cut and paste a small encyclopedia article.
My own view for a community of practice like this is that prestige is the only real currency. At the end of the day, contributors to a commons need ultimately to have the value of their work recognised: by community status, by public recognition, or by some other tangible reward. And good work needs to be recognised as being better than average in some way before much will actually be done.
Also commons and communities like this probably need to find the right niche: nobody is going to publish in a wiki something they could publish in a journal; but people might consider publishing incidental by-products they otherwise have no outlet for.
The open software community has some of this down very well: you gain administrative privileges (Wikipedia) or a special class of user name (Ubuntu forums) if you contribute regularly and fruitfully to the commons. I believe you once told me of a project that allowed you greater and greater freedom to make changes on the basis of how infrequently the changes you made were rolled back.
None of this will get you tenure, but there really is no free lunch.
-d
On Tue, 2006-21-03 at 22:15 +0000, James Cummings wrote:
Binkley, Peter wrote:
There is a cluster of projects around MetaScholar and the Ockham project that are working on this kind of framework: http://www.metascholar.org/ and http://www.ockham.org/ . I haven't kept up with them recently to see what's actually been deployed, though. They are producing open-source tools to do this kind of work, so it would be interesting to try them out in the digital medieval community.
Among digitization projects the most radical I'm aware of is Project Runeberg in Sweden, which allows users to proofread the OCR text against the page images and submit corrections. http://runeberg.org (the server seems to be slow at the moment, though). Sample page: http://runeberg.org/hagberg/e/0046.html .
I only had a quick glance at this, but doesn't this seem almost identical to the way that Distributed Proofreaders[1] work for creating etexts for Project Gutenberg? You see the scanned image and text of the OCR, and make corrections.
What I've been dreaming of is sort-of something which does this for more than just the initial stages, but also successive layers of markup, transformation, etc. What is increasingly becoming see as a virtual research environment.
So not only the initial transcription, but also tools to add increasingly detailed layers of markup, image annotation, with revision/version control, xml validation, creation of supporting files (xsl, etc.), all through a single web interface. The idea being that this would allow communal development of complex resources, as well as some form of hosted preservation for them. Sorta like a sourceforge for the communal development of electronic resources. The major flaws with this is of course the solitaire nature of much humanities research, and the need for academic economics.
-James
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