Collaborative Integration and Annotation Services for Australian Literature Communities (Aus-e-Lit) Project enable collaboration on Henry Lawson

ANDS and ARCS are supporting a set of National e-Research Architecture Taskforce (NeAT) projects. One is building new services for Australian literature communities.The Aus-e-Lit Project commenced in July 2008. The Project's goal is to help AustLit users to discover, organise, describe, analyse, collaborate and communicate in a networked environment. This will be achieved by providing a federated search of selected databases, an annotation service and a new tool, LORE, that will enable users to create and publish compound digital objects in a variety of presentation forms.

In consultation with members of research communities active in the field of Australian literary studies, the project team is working on several case studies that will be used to inform the design of these new services:

•  Professor Paul Eggert has an international reputation in the field of scholarly editing. To inform the development of tools useful to this field of study, he has generously provided data from a research project that aims to produce a variorum edition of the complete poetry of the most important colonial Australian poet, Charles Harpur. This data will provide the necessary challenges to create tools that assist with textual comparison and the annotation of sometimes complex material, personal and institutional relationships that influence textual transmission. 
• An example of collaborative annotation that assists literary analysis is being developed around Henry Lawson’s short story, ‘The Drover’s Wife’, published in The Bulletin Story Book in 1902 along with many other stories that first appeared in the Sydney Bulletin during the 1890s. Drawing on the experience of teachers and researchers in English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland and members of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL), this example will demonstrate the potential for collaborative annotation in teaching and research. Using LORE, the possibilities for re-use of these annotations in scholarly outputs such as annotated bibliographies, essays and study guides will be explored. The Bulletin Story Book will also provide an appropriate example to visualise relationships within a specific literary and print culture.
• AustLit hosts a number of Research Communities. In consultation with members of the Black Words Research Community, LORE will be used to create trails through AustLit data and appropriate internet resources for research and teaching purposes. These trails will inform the creation of style-sheets that will enable users to publish the compound objects they create in a variety of formats.
• The Aus-e-Lit Project is also engaging with Professor David Carter's research project, 'America Publishes Australia: Australian Books and American Publishers, 1890-2005.' Evidence accumulated during this project could enhance AustLit records by providing information not normally indexed by AustLit, such as literary agents, editors, print runs, dustcover images, or more comprehensive bibliographical descriptions. Examples from this project will be developed to demonstrate how the accumulation of such data might be analysed and re-used for different research questions. This project will provide a useful example to develop tools that can visualise the personal and institutional networks traversed by Australian writers in trans-national print culture.

The Aus-e-Lit Project is also exploring the potential for empirical reporting of data visualisation and text-mining (using AustLit data and available full-text) to support many alternative questions that could arise in research projects like those outlined above.

Prototypes of the federated search, annotation service and LORE have been demonstrated locally and internationally, attracting positive responses from potential users and software developers. Papers related to these demonstrations can be found on the Aus-e-Lit Project Site. A video of a demonstration prepared for a Universitas 21 meeting held in Brisbane in March 2009 can be viewed here. More videos will be posted here as the interface develops during the next six months. Feedback from a demonstration of the new services at the annual ASAL conference will be used to inform future development and facilitate increased user engagement with the new services. An exhibition of completed case studies and new user-driven projects is planned for the 2010 ASAL conference.

General news about the project will be posted occasionally on the Project blog. For more detailed information on the Aus-e-Lit Project, please contact the project manager, Roger Osborne: r.osborne@uq.edu.au