In this half-day workshop, participants will learn how to use different components of the Linked Editing Academic Framework (LEAF) digital scholarship production platform: encoding and annotating texts, entity tagging and reconciliation, coordinating different types of media files into compound objects and galleries, managing metadata and workflow tracking, and producing a simple collection of objects. Using sample text and image objects, with the possibility of experimenting with their own materials, participants will come away with an understanding of how LEAF supports collaborative digital scholarly production in an open-source, open-access web environment, connected to a linked data infrastructure.
Concept
This workshop, which is aimed at both digital humanities researchers and institutional library and information technology administrators interested in instituting efficient scholarly production, research data repository, and publication workflows, will offer participants the chance to experiment with model research projects in LEAF. The workshop will combine demonstration and hands-on activities to cover:
- the basics: LEAF navigation, menus, user dashboards (hands-on);
- metadata: overview of its importance, and how to create it (hands-on);
- scholarly curation: uploading an image and or text to being a thematic collection;
- born-digital scholarship: creating a document (hands-on);
- semantic markup and linked data identifiers: editing, semi-automated entity tagging and reconciliation (hands-on) using the LEAF-Writer TEI (XML) and RDF editor (available embedded in LEAF or as a standalone editor);
- tracking work: adding a workflow stamp and communicating with collaborators (hands-on);
- project creation: creating a home page for a simple object-driven web collection (hands-on);
- linked data conversion: making data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) using the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) (demo)
Background
The Linked Editing Academic Framework virtual research environment (LEAF) is a flexible collaborative platform that enables scholars to create, publish, and preserve digital editions, born-digital scholarship, digital collections, and virtual exhibits – of texts, images, audio files, and videos.
LEAF tackles the challenges faced by many in the DH community who undertake and maintain complex research projects, whether as part of a solo or small team edition or a large-scale multi-institutional collection: the need to ensure that these projects remain operational and available to editorial teams and audiences, at the same time encouraging new participants who may or may not have digital experience to create new knowledge in dynamic and iterative contexts.
Adhering to the FAIR principles for enabling the reuse of data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable), LEAF uses open-source software, open-access platforms, and open international standards for best practices in text-encoding (TEI-XML) and web annotation (RDF), in a Drupal 9 Islandora 2 content management and preservation system. Perhaps most compelling for the ADHO community, LEAF is designed to promote sustainability by aiming at a broad user base through bridging gaps between scholars who have coding and encoding experience, and those who do not. LEAF gives broader communities of researchers, teachers, and students the opportunity to take part in digital knowledge production and open collaboration.The workshop will end with an open discussion about pursuing such forms of open knowledge production and collaboration.
LEAF emerges from a collaboration to extend the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) virtual research environment that has, since 2016, supported dozens of projects, including projects produced by scholars and students new to digital scholarship. It is being developed, with Bucknell University and Newcastle University as founding partners, at the Universities of Alberta and Guelph. LEAF will roll out its enhancement of CWRC’s functionality through collaborative software development in 2023 through multiple instances of the modular LEAF platform in Canada, the US, and UK.
LEAF’s sister project, the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS), is dedicated to interlinking humanistic research and cultural heritage data across the Semantic Web. LINCS supports the development and mobilization of a suite of tools to create, search, and visualize Linked Open Data (LOD). LEAF and LEAF-Writer create an accessible on-ramp for LEAF users to be able to generate linked data from metadata, text, and prosopographical information to contribute to the Semantic Web. Entity IDs captured in LEAF-Writer can in turn create Web Annotations using RDF. LEAF users will therefore be able to push to LINCS linked data based on their projects’ metadata, markup, and annotations.
Features and Functions to be explored
Working on their own laptops (no software installation is required), participants will experience various aspects of LEAF’s functionality:
- Simple Drupal collection development
- Object locking/unlocking
- Workflow tracking documentation
- Rich text-encoding in the LEAF-Writer editor that creates both XML and/or RDF
- Entity tagging in NERVE, the Named Entity Recognition Vetting Environment
Bibliography
Berners-Lee, Tim, et al (2001): “The Semantic Web,” in Scientific American, 284, 5: 28–37.
Brown, Susan (2014): “Scaling Up Collaboration Online: Towards a Collaboratory for Research on Canadian Writing,” in International Journal of Canadian Studies 48: 233-51.
Brown, Susan / Simpson, John (2015): “An Entity By Any Other Name: Linked Open Data as a Basis for a Decentered, Dynamic Scholarly Publishing Ecology | Scholarly and Research Communication. 6,2. <https://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/212>.
Brown, Susan / Simpson, John / the INKE Research Group / the CWRC project team (2015): “The Changing Culture of Humanities Scholarship: Iteration, Recursion, and Versions in Scholarly Collaboration Environments; Special Issue on "Building Partnerships to Transform Scholarly Publishing," in Scholarly and Research Communication 5.4. https://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/191
Brown, Susan / Cummings, James / Frizzera, Luciano / Ilovan, Mihaela / Jakacki, Diane / Milio, Rachel (2022): “Engaging TEI Editors Through LEAF-Writer,” at the TEI 2022 Annual Meeting.
Canning, Erin / Brown, Susan / Roger, Sarah / Martin, Kim (2022): “The Power to Structure: Making Meaning from Metadata through Ontologies,” in Kula 6.3.
Cope, Bill, et al., eds (2011): Towards a Semantic Web: Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research. Chandos Publishing.
Cummings, James (2019): “Opening the Book: Data Models and Distractions in Digital Scholarly Editing.” International Journal of Digital Humanities. 1, 179-193 (2019)
Cummings, James / Flex, Valentina / Healey, Alexandra / Jakacki, Diane / Johnson, Ian / Pirmann, Carrie (2022): “Evolving Hands: HTR and TEI Workflows for cultural institutions,” at the TEI 2022 Annual Meeting.
Eide, Øyvind (2014): “Ontologies, Data Modeling, and TEI.” Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, no. Issue 8, Issue 8, Dec. 2014. journals.openedition.org, https://doi.org/10.4000/jtei.1191.
Jakacki, Diane / Brown, Susan / Cummings, James / Ilovan, Mihaela (2022): “The Linked Editing Academic Framework: Creating an Editorial Environment for Collaborative Scholarship and Publication," at the Digital Humanities 2022 Annual Meeting. <https://youtu.be/jyCXRrfh5vk>.