XplanaZine

Yesterday, I looked at some of the advanced searching and sorting and other kinds of text analysis tools available for digital texts. Now I’d like to turn to some interactive features that are intended to enhance the user’s experience in reading the digital text.
You can see immediately how far these free websites lag behind the wide range of features made available by commercial publishers for their e-texts (e.g. Metatext). This is not surprising: complex server-side programs are beyond the reach of many of the amateur enthusiasts on whom the Internet continues to depend. New high-powered digital library initiatives with major government funding are now starting to take shape (like the Million Book Project at CMU), but these archival sites miss some of the simple human friendliness and eccentric sense of community that you will find at sites like the Baldwin Project or the ELF: Electronic Literature Foundation.
User sets display preferences. One of my favorite websites where the user can set a wide range of display preferences is at the Baldwin Project (”Bringing Yesterday’s Classics to Today’s Children”). This online collection of children’s literature (public domain) allows the user to configure almost every feature of the webpage display: text size and font, navigation, notes, vocabulary, study questions, images. Given that this is a site with materials for very young readers (like The Rainbow Book of Fairy Tales for Four-Year-Olds), it is highly desirable to be able to display only the text, with extremely large font, and the color preferences set to the child’s favorites. The exciting new International Children’s Digital Library also allows different modes of reading, which are very (!) clearly explained on their truly helpful Help page. Building things for children seems to bring out the best in people: you’ve got to do right if you are doing something for kids. Kids are not going to use these resources just because they are “supposed” to, but only because they are truly meaningful and enjoyable.
User can take and save notes. Unbound Bible provides one of the most extensive collections of Biblical texts online (Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, along with over 40 modern translations in languages other than English), and it also provides great learning enhancement tools for the user: MyNotes and MyClipboard. With MyNotes, Every user can save notes on Bible verses, which can then be viewed, edited, or searched later on. With MyClipboard, users can cut-and-paste from the texts that they view online, saving their favorite verses and passages for future reference. (The difference is just that MyNotes is verse specific, and those notes will be displayed whenever you look at the verse in question - no matter what translation you are looking at; MyClipboard is for notes and content that you want to save and view as a separate document.) It’s a great user-centric feature that naturally emergesfrom the religious devotional energy that drives this project; the goal is not just to read the text, but to engage with it personally and persistently over time.
Discussion forums. In addition to keeping your own personal notes, what if you want to discuss the texts you are reading with others online? A site that makes good use of forums and many other extremely user-friendly features is ELF, the Electronic Literature Foundation. They work with public domain texts, adding valuable features including discussion forums. Just click on the Forum link at their Dante or Shakespeare or Chaucer pages (and try the Middle English - Modern English option for Chaucer). Their goal is to “provide free access to a variety of texts from world literature available in several languages, with forums for communication regarding these works, for all types of readers.” It’s an admirable goal and they’ve done an admirable job, cobbling their site together with user donations and the money they receive by refer links to Amazon (which is also how the great guys at RadioParadise manage to get by). CAREO, Campus Alberta Repository of Educational Objects also features discussion boards to go with its texts (like this example for Stevenson’s Treasure Island), although while browsing I did not find any discussion boards which contained posts yet. CAREO is enormously impressive (it’s clearly built to grow and grow and grow), but it lacks the funky friendliness of the tiny ELF.
Multiple text formats. The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts features on-the-fly creation of PDF versions of the digital texts you will find there. The Alex Catalogue is an amateur labor of love; for a high-powered example of this same attempt to match the reader’s format needs, check out the Million Book Project (”digitize a million books by 2005″). They offer HTML, PDF, raw text, and other download-friendly formats. (And although it’s not a exactly a discussion board, readers can contribute reviews of the online texts at this project).
Online courses for online libraries. What happens when someone wants to take a text and do more with it, learn more about it? At WorldWide School, a Library of online texts is joined with Online Courses that are free and open to all. Their goal is “to provide resources that benefit and enhance existing educational organizations and institutions.” The site seems to be suffering from a fair amount of disrepair - and a new version is promised in Spring 2000 (”a second version of the World Wide School will be unveiled. It will include chapter tests and ways for teachers to track students”). So while it looks like WorldWide School began with enormously good intentions, they do not seem to be fully up and running at present. Yet this is the only example of a website that I know of which boasts an extensive digital library and an attempt to provide interactive online learning experiences.
Am I wrong? I hope so! Please tell me about any other sites you might know of which attempt to harness the power of digital texts with online courses - for free, on the open Internet. I would be so glad to know that there are more opportunities like this out there! (You’ll find a Discuss button at the top of the page.)