Well, that’s what Textflow calls their not-yet-in-beta collaborative editing system. It certainly looks attractive, it even looks like it might be nice to use. I have only had a quick look, but it claims to offer more than just multi-user document editing; instead of requiring editors to check-in/check-out portions of a document (hence locking their edits), Textflow chunks the document down into a database of edits and revision pieces of arbitrary size and maintains all the pieces of a document simultaneously over many editors. Its killer feature might be the ability to import several versions of a Word file and build a revision history with a ‘final state’ copy ready to commit or roll-back edits.
Faces stiff competition from Google Docs and ThinkFree (among others), but they look to be raising the bar.
Category: Methods
Spinuzzi and Digital History Hacks
Clay Spinuzzi has a blog, Spinuzzi, that was recommended on Humanist. His recent posting a long thoughtful reflections on methodology, especially as applied to rhetoric and writing research. He comments on Composing Research by Cindy Johanek which critiques the ostensibly anectdotal methods of many researchers in rhetoric and communication.
Another blog that Shawn Day pointed me to is William J. Turkel’s Digital History Hacks. He writes longer posts on topics like What’s the Opposite of Big History? He is comfortable with programming and hardware design.
ForensicXP for forensic document analysis
ForensicXP is a device that does forensic document imaging. It combines 3D imaging with chemical analysis to do Hyperspectrum Imaging and Processing. This can be used to recover “obliterated” writing, to figure out the sequence of line drawing (what lines/words were drawn first), and to detect additions and substitutions. Obviously it also helps identify the chemistry (ink) used.
Thanks to John for this.
Kirschenbaum: Hamlet.doc?
Matt Kirschenbaum has published an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled, Hamlet.doc? Literature in a Digital Age (From the issue of August 17, 2007.) The article nicely summarizes teases us with the question of what we scholars could learn about the writing of Hamlet if Shakespeare had left us his hard-drive. Kirschenbaum has nicely described and theorized the digital archival work humanists will need to learn to do in his forthcoming book from MIT Press, Mechanisms. Here is the conclusion of the Chronicle article,
Literary scholars are going to need to play a role in decisions about what kind of data survive and in what form, much as bibliographers and editors have long been advocates in traditional library settings, where they have opposed policies that tamper with bindings, dust jackets, and other important kinds of material evidence. To this end, the Electronic Literature Organization, based at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, is beginning work on a preservation standard known as X-Lit, where the “X-” prefix serves to mark a tripartite relationship among electronic literature’s risk of extinction or obsolescence, the experimental or extreme nature of the material, and the family of Extensible Markup Language technologies that are the technical underpinning of the project. While our focus is on avant-garde literary productions, such literature has essentially been a test bed for a future in which an increasing proportion of documents will be born digital and will take fuller advantage of networked, digital environments. We may no longer have the equivalent of Shakespeare’s hard drive, but we do know that we wish we did, and it is therefore not too late ‚Äî or too early ‚Äî to begin taking steps to make sure we save the born-digital records of the literature of today.