The recent flurry of discussion about what is a blog seems to have yielded a fine definition courtesy of Greg Ritter: “A weblog is a collection of discrete, dated entries that are organized sequentially in time and published to the World Wide Web.” This definition is also a good way to pick up the topic of small-scale efforts at digitized text collections v. massive archival projects (sort of ELF v. the Million Book Project). What we are dealing with here is a kind of continuum having to do with the degree to which navigational paths are created by human beings on the one hand and the degree to which navigational paths are being automatically created by the computer. Continue reading ‘Walking Weird Paths Through the Digital Libraries’
Archive for June, 2003
Online Conflict Resolution Training: Current Products and Approaches
The Costs of Conflict Are High
Workplace violence in America cost than $4.2 billion, according to the National Safe Workplace Institute (http://www.workviolence.com), which published the results of a 5-year study in 1993. During the 90s, figures fluctuated, but remained high into the new millennium. It is estimated that more than 100,000 violent incidents per year are committed in work environments, with as many as 1,000 deaths nationwide in a bad year. Continue reading ‘Web-Enhanced Human Relations: Conflict Resolution’
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. Continue reading ‘Interactive Features for Digital Texts Online’
I finished up last week with an article on digital texts you can download from digital libraries, along with some observations on how I modify those texts, customizing them for my students’ needs. I’ll start off this week by looking at some of the ways that the digital libraries themselves promote the reformatting of digital texts based on user needs, along with other features that become possible when texts are put online. It is a hodgepodge of very exciting features which, taken together, suggest what amazing things will be possible with the next generation of digital libraries. There is a lot to say here, so I’ll take this in several segments: my focus today will be on computer-aided analysis of texts - this is something of interest both to high-level researchers but also to the general reader. Continue reading ‘Digital Features for Digital Texts: Automatic Text Analysis’
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