Understanding Impacts and Implementations of New Knowledge Environments: The Session Blog
Dr. Ray Siemens presents at PKP 2009. Photo by C. Gratham
Presenter: Dr. Ray Siemens, Director, Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Project. Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing and Professor of English, University of Victoria. Bio
July 10, 2009, 2:30 pm-3:00 pm. SFU Harbour Centre. Rm 1900
Background
The INKE project represents the interdisciplinary work of researchers with specialties spanning humanities, text analysis, information studies, usability, and interface design. The team consists of 35 researchers, 20 institutions, and 20 other partners. Their SSHRC funded work takes a scholarly approach and cast an eye back on the history of the print medium to help understand the roles digital books might play in the future.
Session Overview
After providing an over-view of the team and project, Dr. Siemens summarized the motivation for the study by stating that e-books and e-textuality have “an exciting future … but an inconvenient present”. The exciting future can be illustrated by how pervasive various digital forms of text have already become in society today. But the inconvenient present lies in how little we actually know about this new media form and how the gaps we need to fill before we can make decisions about how to best use this “new knowledge machine”.
We still have a long way to go. As Dr. Siemens reminds us, “the e-book is still just a pale representation of it’s paper counterpart.” He suggests that one of the main reasons for this is that we still model electronic documents to mimic their print based forms and in doing so we import the same conceptual models from the print world. To achieve the benefits of e-books and documents, Dr. Siemens says that we need to reconceptualize these core critical and textual models.
The team’s research is clustered around the following four interdisciplinary areas: textual studies, user experience, interface design, and information management. And through these clusters they have identified a number of gaps in the existing knowledge leading to the following research questions:
- Has the way we read and experience information changed since the rise of the Internet, and, if so, how?
- How do different knowledge environments influence the way we engage and use information?
- What new features can we design to improve digital information environments and their interfaces?
- How can we better design the data that underlies and serves the needs of those using such digital information environments?
- How does this interdisciplinary team work together to achieve our research objectives given the multiple lenses through which they approach the same questions?
Dr. Siemens closed his presentation with three “Rubber hits the road” impact questions:
- Can the humanities find this problem worth engaging with?
- Can the interdisciplinary cores yield something tangible?
- If so, will the results be socially applicable, embraceable, and ubiquitous?
Questions
Time limitations did not allow questions for Dr. Siemens
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