Amanda Visconti

Abstract: Digital texts promise to allow learning beyond that possible with traditional resources. Purposebuilt digital texts are crafted for specific research purposes, with developer-users and devoted academics comprising their primary, "scholar" audience. A secondary, "amateur" audience of learners with less digital text experience also relies on theses purpose-built resources. Does the promise of new learning from digital texts extend beyond scholars to amateurs, or does the design of purpose-built digital texts, by focusing on more experienced users with direct lines of communication to digital text developers, prevent this extension of benefits? This study gauged one subgroup of amateur users' perceptions of the value of digital texts in terms of answering self-generated research queries. The participants, graduate students from the University of Michigan's information master's program, worked with a digital text and completed a survey assessing their experience of digital text features and perception of their learning success. An analysis of the survey data produces an introductory understanding of amateur users' perceptions of their digital text use, their design needs, and their success or failure at learning through digital texts. The narrative responses suggest that while the idea of new learning from digital texts is foreign to the amateur audience, their assessment of digital text features was not particularly marked by their amateur status. This result suggests that designing purpose-built digital texts to serve both digital text scholars as well as some amateur subgroups is a reasonable task.

Abstract: The present volume “Digital Scholarly Editions as Interfaces” is the follow-up publication of the same-titled symposium that was held in 2016 at the University of Graz and the twelfth volume of the publication series of the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE). It is the result of a successful collaboration between members of the Centre for Information Modelling at the University of Graz, the Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network DiXiT, a EC Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action, and the IDE. All articles have undergone a peer reviewing process and are published in Open Access. They document the current state of research on design, application and implications of both user and machine interfaces in the context of digital scholarly editions. The editors of the volume are grateful to the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions for enabling not only the symposium in 2016 but also the publication of the present volume with their financial support. Special thanks are also due to the staff of the Centre for Information Modelling, above all Georg Vogeler, who contributed to the successful organisation and completion of the symposium and this volume with their ideas and continuous support. Furthermore we want to thank all authors as well as all peer reviewers for the professional cooperation during the publication process. Last but not least we want to thank the many people involved in creating the present volume: Barbara Bollig (Trier) for language corrections and formal suggestions, Bernhard Assmann and Patrick Sahle (Cologne) for support and advises during the typese ing process, Selina Galka (Graz) for verifying and archiving (archive.org) all referenced URLs in January 2018, Julia Sorouri (Cologne) for the design of the cover as well as the artist Franz Konrad (Graz), who provided his painting “Desktop” (www.franzkonrad.com/gallery/desktop-2008-2010/) as cover image. We hope you enjoy reading and get as much intrigued by the topic “Digital Scholarly Editions as Interfaces” as we did.