Digital Literacy Centre

The following is from http://networkedbook.org/ an interesting project to create collaborative articles and essays in the form of commentary, translation and revision. Its focus is network culture. It still uses the term “book,” which is interesting, perhaps temporary, and perhaps an opening for considerations of predominating frames in discourse. Of course it is as valid to ask why not book, as much as why – taking into account that these terms are as fluid and mutable as any cultural language.

Here is the About section quoted:

“A networked book is an open book designed to be written, edited and read in a networked environment.” — Institute for the Future of the Book

In 2007, Jo-Anne Green and Helen Thorington (Co-Directors, New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. | Turbulence.org) proposed Networked to Eduardo Navas (NewMediaFIX). Along with Sean Dockray (Telic Arts Exchange) and Anne Bray (Freewaves), they developed an application to the National Endowment for the Arts, which funded the project in 2008.

An international Call for Proposals was issued. It defined the project’s Goals and Objectives and invited contributions that critically and creatively rethink how networked art is categorized, analyzed, legitimized — and by whom — as norms of authority, trust, authenticity and legitimacy evolve. A committee of nine reviewed the submissions: four authors were commissioned to develop chapters that are now open for commentary, revision, and translation. A fifth — one of the runners-up — was invited to contribute. Networked is open to additional chapters. See Guidelines.

Networked proposes that a history or critique of interactive and/or participatory art must itself be interactive and/or participatory; that the technologies used to create a work suggest new forms a “text” might take.

Dr Stan Ruecker is at the Digital Literacy Centre’s Summer Institute this week talking about humanities visualization, an alternative strategy to data visualization, and performing workshops with Dr Teresa Dobson (Director of the DLC) on Digital Applications for Knowledge Visualization. One of the tools being examined is the Mandala Rich Prospect Browser.

Here is a site where you can read about and play around with a current prototype:

Mandala Rich Prospect Browser

“The Mandala Browser is a rich prospect browsing concept that allows users to explore a data set using multiple criteria. Unlike boolean searching, the Mandala Browser permits a more nuanced search by allowing users to determine the strength of each criterion. Its design allows enormous flexibility in terms of the number of criteria used, the number of items represented, and the types of items represented.” (From http://mandala.humviz.org/)