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Dissertation

"Songs of Innocence and of Experience:" Amateur Users and Digital Texts

09 May 2010-
TL;DR: One subgroup of amateur users' perceptions of the value of digital texts in terms of answering self-generated research queries is gauged, suggesting that designing purpose-built digital texts to serve both digital text scholars as well as some amateur subgroups is a reasonable task.
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.
Citations
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01 Jan 2018
TL;DR: 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).
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.

17 citations

References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Knowledge elicitation has a rich background and has recently gained impetus in part because of the advent of expert systems and related technologies for preserving knowledge as mentioned in this paper. But given the diversity of disciplines, topics, paradigms, and goals, it is difficult to make the literature cohere around a methodological theme.

546 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: A review of evaluation efforts in research and practice concentrates on derivation of criteria used in evaluation, and a conceptual framework for evaluation is suggested.
Abstract: While there were many efforts in the research and practices of digital libraries, evaluation was not a conspicuous activity. It is well recognized that digital library evaluation is a complex and difficult undertaking. Challenges facing digital library evaluation are enumerated. A conceptual framework for evaluation is suggested. A review of evaluation efforts in research and practice concentrates on derivation of criteria used in evaluation. Essential requirements for evaluation are stated. Discussed are constructs, context, and criteria of digital libraries: What should we evaluate? For what purpose do we evaluate? Who should evaluate? At what level do we evaluate? Upon what criteria do we evaluate? In addition, included are suggestions for adaptation of criteria from related activities. The article is considered as a part of the evolution of concepts for digital library evaluation.

228 citations


""Songs of Innocence and of Experien..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Such a study would test the relevance of a digital text to its proposed audience, measuring the relatedness of the material to a project's users research (Saracevic, 2007a, p. 1918). Saracevic (2007b) examined relevance studies that looked at user assessments of web pages, including comments on decision-making and measures of perceived usefulness and authority (p....

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Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2010
TL;DR: This entry describes the goals and agenda of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), an independent, nonprofit organization located in Washington, D.C.
Abstract: This entry describes the goals and agenda of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), an independent, nonprofit organization located in Washington, D.C.

173 citations


Additional excerpts

  • ..., 1997 and Dervin, Connway, & Prabha, 2004), and scholarly workers using academic libraries as "information environments" (e.g. Brockman, Neumann, Palmer, & Tidline, 2001; Friedlander, 2002; and Troll Covey, 2002)....

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Proceedings ArticleDOI
06 Nov 2007
TL;DR: The system, FeatureLens1, visualizes a text collection at several levels of granularity and enables users to explore interesting text patterns, and focuses on frequent itemsets of n-grams, as they capture the repetition of exact or similar expressions in the collection.
Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of making text mining results more comprehensible to humanities scholars, journalists, intelligence analysts, and other researchers, in order to support the analysis of text collections. Our system, FeatureLens1, visualizes a text collection at several levels of granularity and enables users to explore interesting text patterns. The current implementation focuses on frequent itemsets of n-grams, as they capture the repetition of exact or similar expressions in the collection. Users can find meaningful co-occurrences of text patterns by visualizing them within and across documents in the collection. This also permits users to identify the temporal evolution of usage such as increasing, decreasing or sudden appearance of text patterns. The interface could be used to explore other text features as well. Initial studies suggest that FeatureLens helped a literary scholar and 8 users generate new hypotheses and interesting insights using 2 text collections.

134 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: How usability testing improved the quality of a computer-based chemistry course and facilitated a clearer analysis of the learning effectiveness of this course is described.
Abstract: Brigham Young University's Center for Instructional Design (CID) creates online courses and multimedia instructional applications for university faculty. This paper asserts that including usability testing as a part of evaluation improves the quality and effectiveness of computer-mediated instruction. The paper describes the fundamental purpose and functions of usability testing, and also distinguishes between different forms of evaluation: accessibility, quality assurance (QA), usability and implementation. Through a detailed case study, we describe how usability testing improved the quality of a computer-based chemistry course and facilitated a clearer analysis of the learning effectiveness of this course.

84 citations

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What is the significance of the title "Songs of Innocence"?

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