Digress.it screencasts

In an attempt to breathe life back into our beleaguered tagginganna project, Mark, Alex and I met a couple of weeks ago to try and kick start it again. It's been difficult with each of us doing at least two jobs but we're hopeful that we can progress things a bit further this semester. One part of the project is to develop some 'how to' screencasts for people who might want to use the Digress.it platform for similar purposes, so with that in mind Alex and I recording four rough and ready screencasts to explain how to:

• registering on Digress.it
• edit settings
• create an about page
• publish and schedule posts

And here they are. Like I say, a bit rough and ready but hopefully useful guidance for someone who wants to start using the platform.

Update on developments for tagginganna

Apparently someone suggested on twitter last week that Alex, Mark and I might be keeping our tagginganna project secret. I just checked my blog and the last time I blogged about it was on 7 September when Alex presented at ALTC and before that it was July so I can quite understand why it might be thought we were being secretive. Unfortunately the reason is much more mundane; we've just been busy. The autumn term was a bit of a write-off for me because of the acting-up, but we did make some progress using a new tool from Birmingham City University's Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES). This is how they describe the tool.

The wiki interface supports the collaborative close reading and analysis of texts, by allowing researchers, teachers and students to attach comments to individual words or phrases within these texts or to whole texts. These comments take the form of analyses or interpretations, and can generate intra- and inter-textual links.

The 'Wiki without a name' from RDEUS has been an exciting development and one we'll be reporting on when we have more data - but feedback from students so far has been very positive and we're looking forward to testing it further.

Meanwhile, we commissioned Eddie Tejeda, the creator of Digress.it to do some development work on the site to make it more suitable for our needs. We are in the process of testing the developments but the items we requested were as follows:

• tag comments
• search comments
• layered tables of contents

Which seem to be nearly there. More to follow...

Digress.it developments

Back in April Mark and I went to the University of Lincoln to chat to Joss Winn about our Tagginganna project, and more specifically about digress.it ('a WordPress plugin that offers paragraph-level commenting in the margins of a text). It was really useful to hear from Joss some background to digress.it, including:

• how The Institute for the Future of the Book kicked things off ('a small think-and-do tank investigating the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens' - isn't 'think-and-do tank' a brilliant term)
• how Commentpress then developed ('an open source theme and plugin for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text')
• how Joss and Tony Hirst set up Write to Reply using Commentpress to allow people to comment on public reports
• how if:book developed out of Institute of the Future of the Book using Commentpress
• how Eddie Tejeda, who has been pivotal in the software developments for all of the above then wrote digress.it
• and how Cornell Univeristy and the New York Public Library are using digress.it in some fascinating projects (those links are to the projects not the institutions)

In addition to finding out more background to digress.it the other aim of our meeting with Joss was to discover how likely it was that we could influence the development of digress.it to make it more suitable for the the purpose for which we are wanting to use it (see Tagginganna progress). The developments we need are the ability for readers to tag comments and search comments, and the option for administrators to choose a layered table of contents (to allow for more 'chapters'). Joss thought all these would be things that would be useful to the evolution of digress.it more generally so said that Eddie would probably be willing to develop them (and clearly the best placed to do so). And as it has taken so long to recruit a Research Assistant to the project (it still hasn't happened yet) we have money in our project budget we can redirect to opensource software development rather than spending the majority on a Research Assistant.

So on Monday I had a Skype call to San Francisco with Eddie and explained our requirements and he was very positive. They'll be a major upgrade of digress.it in the next couple of weeks, after which we can start work on the detail. And by which time we will also have some exciting news regarding the Research Assistant. In fact, we hope to have that by Monday...

It's going to work after all.