At Kalamazoo last year, I heard a discussion of a project that was planning to use an virtual commons--i.e. a place where users could contribute to the development of the project through shared annotation, textual development, and the like (I think they actually described it as a piazza. As I understood the idea, and in discussion at the Digital Medievalist business meeting a couple of people mentioned similar proposal, the idea was to build what we might now think of as adding wiki-like capabilities to a larger, unified, scholarly project.
Does anybody know of any scholarly projects that have actually implemented such virtual piazza-type interaction? I'm interested in projects that allows arbitrary users to contribute to the content, either with or without refereeing.
-d
Suda online (http://www.stoa.org/sol/) is online quite long now, the Virtual Humanities Lab (http://dev.stg.brown.edu/projects/VHL/about.php) is quite new. Both require some sort of registration for users to contribute to the content. Is some sort of quality control possible without some sort of registration? Notis
2006/3/19, Daniel O'Donnell caedmon@uleth.ca:
Does anybody know of any scholarly projects that have actually implemented such virtual piazza-type interaction? I'm interested in projects that allows arbitrary users to contribute to the content, either with or without refereeing.
-d
-- University of Cambridge Grammar of Medieval Greek project
On 3/22/06, Notis Toufexis notis.toufexis@gmail.com wrote:
Suda online (http://www.stoa.org/sol/) is online quite long now, the Virtual Humanities Lab (http://dev.stg.brown.edu/projects/VHL/about.php ) is quite new. Both require some sort of registration for users to contribute to the content. Is some sort of quality control possible without some sort of registration?
We at the VHL struggled with that, and came up with a compromise. There are actually two different spaces where people may contribute. Text annotation using the annotation engine, which will show notes "within" texts, is more for established scholars with accounts that we give them from our end. So they can't self-register; but if they're interested and qualified, they (you!) are welcome to request an annotation account. We haven't refused anyone yet; it's been a pretty self-selecting group.
However, there's also a discussion forum, intended mostly for verification work on the (long and rather involved) indexes that we've put up, but any other relevant discussion as well. The forum requires registration as well, but people can do it themselves and of course for free.
Some have already registered, although things are a bit slow in starting. We're not losing hope, though, and in the meantime are catching and (hopefully) squashing bugs. :)
We'll see if this dual system -- one open space, one not-so-open space -- will work.
-Vika
-- Vika Zafrin Director, Virtual Humanities Lab http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/vhl/
Brown University Box 1942 Providence, RI 02912 USA (401)863-3984
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Daniel O'Donnell -
Notis Toufexis -
Vika Zafrin