collaborative authoring, use and maintenance of a multidisciplinary textbook

Collaborative Authoring, Use and Maintenance of

a Multidisciplinary Textbook

Robert J. [email protected]

@rjglushko

Books in Browsers

25 October 2013

SCHOOL OF INFORMATIONUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

mailto:[email protected]

•The interwoven challenge(s) of multidisciplinarity and collaboration

•Our crucible: The Discipline of Organizing

•Implications for:

•Book & ebook design

•Authoring

•Maintenance and evolution

Today’s Talk

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We can note how these domains and types of collections differ… or we can emphasize that they are all “Organizing Systems”

A collection of resources Intentionally arrangedTo enable some set of interactions

The Concept of the “Organizing System”

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Published by MIT Press in May 2013 as a printed book and as epub3 and Kindle ebooks

In August we published an “Academic Edition eBook” with many enhancements to the epub3 5


The Discipline of Organizing

•A textbook for a multidisciplinary field is challenging to write…

•…and changes what a book is•…and changes what an ebook is•…and changes how they are maintained and evolve

The Challenge(s) of Multidisciplinarity

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•Identifies / explains the concepts at the intersection of multiple disciplines

•Uses discipline-neutral vocabulary•Incorporates discipline-specific concepts and examples in the context of the transdisciplinary content and vocabulary

What Makes a Text Multidisciplinary?

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•A BROAD textbook for a multidisciplinary field represents all the disciplines that contribute to it

•A DEEP textbook treats all the disciplines with rigor and nuance

Can a textbook be deep and broad at the same time?

The Breadth vs. Depth Challenge

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•Using the draft book at different schools purged disciplinary bias, but every adopter and reviewer would suggest topics and examples from their own disciplines to “flesh out the book”

•The book grew bigger and bigger and bigger…

Battling the Breadth vs. Depth Challenge

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•We had been bloating the book with disciplinary nuance that made the book more credible to experts but made it less accessible for students

•The solution turned out to have ancient roots in book design that we have adapted to ebooks

Solving the Breadth vs. Depth Challenge

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The Content of Textbooks

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A textbook contains many types of content, especially in an evolving multidisciplinary field

Supplemental and Core Content

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Some of this content is “core” and essential to the text. Other content is “supplemental”

•“Inline” with the core text• Tables, figures, illustrations, sidebars

•“Pointed to” by the core text• Footnotes, endnotes, glossary entries, citations

•External to the core text• Appendices, commentaries and reviews, case studies

Supplemental Content

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•The simplest mechanism for a personalized reading experience

•A reader gets the content and (logically) includes it in the “text stream”

•Example: with footnotes, endnotes, glossary terms, bibliographic references, visual or hypertextual inclusion is an optional act by the reader

Selective Inclusion of Supplemental Content

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Endnote Markers in Print

ENDNOTES MARKED WITH NUMBERED SUPERSCRIPTS

Link following “by hand and eye”

•Supplemental content can be tagged or typed by discipline, target audience, or a contextual category

•Reader can use these tags to decide whether or not to read the note

•Useful in both print and ebooks but radically different user experiences

Using “Tagged Content” to Address the “Breadth” vs.

“Depth” Challenge

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•About 24% of the content in TDO was converted to endnotes tagged by discipline

•This makes depth into a choice rather than a distraction or confusion

•Could think of this as “inevitable” disciplinary-specific annotation that we decided to create in advance

Tagged Endnotes in TDO

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Tagged Endnotes in Print Book(at end of each chapter)

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Pop-up “Web” Note in eBook

Transclusion – a word coined by hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson, is the automatic or “seamless” incorporation of one resource into another

Transclusion of would be less disruptive for readers than link following or pop-ups

No eBook reader currently transcludes, but we can imagine how it might work

Transclusion of Supplemental Content

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Transclusion in eBooks

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•Transclusion mechanisms should be general enough to handle any type of supplemental content

•Any instructor or institution should be able to create supplemental content

•Except with “offline” reading, supplemental content should be discoverable from anywhere

Making Transclusion Extensible

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The “Network” Textbook

•Who can write it?

•Where can you start?

•What are appropriate authoring tools, collaboration mechanisms, and document architectures that can address the intellectual, procedural, technological, and social/cultural challenges?

Collaborative Authoring for a Multidisciplinary Text

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•Coincidence

- Experts in different disciplines each write a chapter that presents their own perspective on the new discipline

Three Authoring Options for Achieving Multidisciplinarity

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Coincidence -> Blind Men and the Elephant

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

•Consensus

- Assemble experts in relevant disciplines. Let them develop a shared vision and plan for the book


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Consensus ->

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A detailed view of the elephant?

Or one with no nuance?

•Evangelism

- One person proposes a vision and plan for the book and recruits experts with specific complementary expertise to become co-authors


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Evangelism – Leading the Elephant

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A Quixotic Quest, or a Successful Crusade?

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•In January 2010, starting with the detailed lecture notes from my Berkeley course, I recruited current and former students to write draft chapters according to an outline I proposed

•The lead authors for each chapter did a “slide swap” from the lecture notes to maximize continuity and minimize redundancy

Evangelical Collaboration with TDO (1)

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•Conway’s Law – the structure of a system reflects the composition and communication of the group that builds it

•How do Committees Invent? (1968)

Unavoidable “Laws of Collaboration” (1)

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•Brooks’s Law – adding people to a late project makes it later

•The Mythical Man-Month (1975)

Unavoidable “Laws of Collaboration” (2)

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•We initially used Word as the authoring software because its ubiquity made it easy to solicit co-authors and reviewers

•As the number of contributors increased, we needed better collaboration support than docs-as-attachments

•Initially we used generic technology (email, Dropbox, Skype) rather than tools with book-specific collaboration functionality

Evangelical Collaboration with TDO (2)

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•We were 90% complete when we learned about O’Reilly’s Atlas single-source publishing system• ASCIIdoc markup editor front end• DocBook XML “under the hood”• git repository for version control• built-in transforms to pdf, html, epub, mobi

Book-Specific Collaboration Environments

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•Faced with the need to convert from Word, we decided that native XML would enable more content-based markup and greater automation than ASCIIdoc

•This seemed like the optimal time for the evangelist / benevolent dictator and his XML publishing markup editor to finish all the unfinished chapters and edit the entire book end-to-end

From Word to XML; From Collaboration to Control

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•The original authoring approach shapes the evolution of the book

•Bottom up or “emergent consensus” approaches impose relatively weak constraints on possible changes to the book; any part is potentially revisable (a la Wikipedia) (a la DITA)

•With a top-down model, the evangelizing author is less willing to allow unconstrained revision; evolution takes place via annotation “at the leaves” rather than by large-scale pruning and grafting (a la DocBook)

Authoring and Evolution

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•We have just published TDO in a “book browser” format augmented with the hypothesis annotation capability

•We hope to create a version in which the existing endnotes appear as hypothesis notes instead

•Need to develop a process by which user-contributed notes might co-evolve with the endnotes published with the book

Managing “Community Content” in TDO

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•An ebook is not a self-contained single book

•Any ebook might be a member of a family of books in a logical repository of structured content resources organized by the author(s) to enable the selection and assembly of coherent subsets

•The content of the book depends on the capabilities of its ereader, blurring the boundary between book and the software that “reads” it, especially when annotation is enabled

So what is an ebook?

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•Multidisciplinarity shapes the design of books and ebooks and the processes for creating and maintaining them

•Selective inclusion of supplemental content is one solution to the breadth vs. depth challenge

•A top-down “evangelism-driven” approach to collaboration encourages an “evolution at the edges” or annotation model of maintenance

Summary

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collaborative authoring, use and maintenance of a multidisciplinary textbook

Documents

core content

text multidisciplinary

types of content

draft book

printed book

bookthe book

content of textbooks

transdisciplinary content