One ’Room’
Access papers, actively read them, review the resulting research, author a new volume and publish in a unified room/space.
or Multi-‘Room’
1) Access Papers in a Personal Library. The user will need to somehow access the right papers for active reading, through some sort of Library/Import/Access interface. The imported papers should be considered read and actively read in other environments, to integrate with step 2 or to go straight to step 3.
2) Research Through Active Reading. Read academic papers and annotate and create extracts, building on the work from year 1.
3) Research Review. The user should be able to access the following in order to review their research, employing a variety of Workstation views (such as Library, Timeline, Citation Tree, keywords etc.):
- Original papers with annotations as papers.
- Extracts from documents, as Extracts which have citation information to be able to access the source papers.
- Annotated bibliographies built from manuscripts for the user to copy quotes from the original papers along with citation information as well as the user’s thoughts.
- Notes for the user to refer to, as a single document or as yellow sticky.
5) Work in a multi-Workstation environment to construct a new, spatially realized paper, as a ‘Volume’, with access to all of the above materials, employing useful Workstation views.
6) Publish the results for other users, and the author themselves, to use in their process of research.
Question
How should we divide up the space, to allow for this process? Should it be reading and annotating in one space, then making a move to another space for authoring, or can we make it all in one space, where the user can ‘summon’ research materials as well as ‘manuscript’, which be within a volume?
Proposal
I can imagine a writing space almost like a typewriter, with the room environment fill with research materials as well as different aspects of what I am writing, perhaps images on a ‘wall’, references on the right etc. and what I am ‘typing’ is on small ‘cards’ which gets strung together with extracts in the main space. This approach would require careful management of many disparate elements in the same space.
Notes
Terms. ‘Paper’ refers to any academic document that is not bound into a bigger collection (‘Journal’). ‘Manuscript’ refers to the user’s own document which they are creating/writing, before it is published as a paper ‘Volume Manuscript’ refers to the XR native document/paper/frame/experience the user is authoring for other academic users and for inclusion in The Future of Text 6.
Original/Extracts. A foreseen issue is that it will likely be necessary to allow the user to interact with extracts and/or original papers separately. For example, in a map type view where the user can select a keyword and see what it connects to, should connecting lines only go to the documents that are relevant or also to extracts from relevant papers where the extracts do not have the keyword?
Manuscripts/Annotated Bibliographies. The user should be able to work on ‘layers’ in some way, where what they are writing (manuscript in a later stage or annotated bibliography when doing active reading).