Leen Breure studied history at the University of Utrecht. Since mid-80s he has worked in the intersection of information technology / the humanities and cultural heritage studies. His current research is about enhanced publications and rich internet publications, organized in close collaboration with DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services), an institute of KNAW (Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences) and NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research)
Maarten Hoogerwerf studied computer science at Delft University of Technology. Since 2006 he works for DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services) where he focuses on persistent identification and integration of research information (researchers, publications, datasets, etc.). Currently he is responsible for the technical infrastructure within DANS and its integration with other national and international infrastructures.
René van Horik works as program manager and researcher at DANS, the Dutch national data archive in the social sciences and humanities. He received his Phd from Delft University of Technology (information science). His research interests are in digital preservation and digital humanities.
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Internet technologies are gradually reshaping the function of traditional scholarly publications. There is a growing tendency in some disciplines to publish a digital paper together with supplements such as images, videos, 3D-models and underlying data. More information requires a better usability in terms of overview and finding information, which has led to new features in journals and thus to modifying and extending this genre. These so-called enhanced publications or rich internet publications have various physical forms: PDF documents with embedded interactive models, HTML files enriched with hyperlinks to contextual information and with facilities to highlight information in the text, or aggregations of documents and other resources linked together through metadata which make them findable for semantic search engines.
However, many of the originally print-based journals, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, are still rather conservative in format and offer hardly any opportunities for enhanced publishing, which leaves room for some form of self-publishing, perhaps as addition to a regular journal article. In this paper we introduce the Xpos’re tools for authoring and displaying an interactive multimedia scholarly publication, which may be created as a digital companion to a regular journal paper and published, for example, on the author or institution’s website in order to share related research products and to achieve greater visibility. We also report about practical experiences with this software in a few research projects.
The Xpos’re software (see: http://xposre.nl/software/) comprises a Flash-based document reader and a set of extensions (plug-ins) that extend the basic functionality of this text browser. The extensions are used to display specific types of multimedia that provide additional functionality, such as viewing images, videos and interactive maps. The input text is XML based, which not only guarantees a durable and flexible encoding of content, but also allows automatic rendering in different formats according to the preferences of users and the limitations of their hardware. In addition, the XML source can be easily transformed to an RDF resource map to meet the requirements of the semantic web. The document reader generates output in HTML, in two flavors, namely a slide based version that uses JavaScript, and a plain HTML text (single page), which is most suitable for printing and which can be used to create e-books. This plain HTML text can also be displayed in a format similar to that of scientific journals through the Xpos’re HTML Reader, which has more features than the automatically generated slides and which can be highly customized by the user.
Tools for authoring and displaying interactive multimedia scholarly publications
The journal article is still the basis of scholarly communication in most
disciplines. For a long time, the available space in a printed publication
and the high production costs have put restrictions on adding supplementary
material such as pictures, maps and fragments from historical sources. The
change to web publishing has taken away these material impediments, but in
facing new media we are inclined to recreate the old genre by new means. The
form and layout of online publications are in general still dominated by
genre conventions based on printed journals and books. The capabilities of
the digital channel are often underutilized, which makes that scholarly
communications are currently at a
There are signs that point to profound changes coming to the system of
scholarly communication
The downside of this transition has a practical problem: the technology required for the novel forms of publishing is generally not yet embedded in a smooth authoring process comparable with that for printed publications. Adding multimedia to a blog may not be a big problem, but a scholarly journal adheres to higher standards of long-term sustainable information access and aesthetic layout, which also places demands on the authoring process, and, therefore, on the tools and templates which authors have at their disposal. Non-printable supplements are often stored in a separate section of the publisher’s website and as such are not perceived as part of the discourse itself. The Xpos’re software package discussed here addresses this type of problem for online publications that contain interactive multimedia closely connected with the text. The pros and cons are best understood after a short overview of the upcoming digital genres (section 1.2 through 1.4) followed by a preliminary conclusion (section 1.5) explaining why new tools are needed.
The innovative scholarly genres can be grouped into a few, not strictly defined categories: (1) enhanced publications, (2) rich internet publication and (3) ebooks. These new genres still reflect many features of the old ones from which they are derived, but have in common a certain integration of the scholarly discourse with interactive access to research material. This integration varies greatly, from linked research data and spreadsheets to embedded interactive statistical charts and maps with results of analysis and computation, image galleries, animated models and videos. The interactivity added to the linear reading allows for diversion from the main line of discourse and enables the user to select the information in which (s)he is particularly interested, to choose different perspectives and to explore data with new questions.
The less advanced category is the so-called
Relating digital content resources that are distributed over different collections (e.g. in literature studies and historic research) can greatly enhance their value provided this is done in an interoperable machine-readable way, which makes that they can be indexed by semantic search engines. The
The advantage of such a package that includes the publication plus loosely coupled addenda which are accessible through hyperlinks, is that the creation is relatively easy, because it does not affect the published document itself; a layer of metadata is sufficient. However, it has a low degree of integration and, therefore, is not particularly comfortable. The display of these extras is usually spread over different windows, each operating in isolation.
The more integrated publication formats cannot be adequately described as
simply
Elsevier’s
Since December 2009 Portland Press has been using Utopia
Documents
The creation of RIPs has far-reaching consequences for the authoring and publishing process. The production system must support the enhancements in storage and layout and many journals have not (yet) chosen to move into this direction; the regular PDF is the ubiquitous standard. This means that authors will have no free choice regarding media rich publishing. The selection of a journal will be based, rather, on more ponderous reasons like ranking and readership than on this presentation aspect. A double track solution is feasible by doing both, publishing the article in a highly ranked journal to earn credits, and providing a text with supplementary material through a private or institutional website to serve the community of peers and to enhance visibility. One may consider this as an alternative form of co-publishing, in which the efforts rather than the expenses are shared — but with which technical means, and can it be done within a reasonable amount of time? An ordinary HTML page is not a good solution, precisely because of all the extra material. Think of a large set of photos, an interactive map for display of research data or an interactive spreadsheet. One needs special components to avoid a messy layout and to provide a decent reading experience, which will require more technical skills than we may expect from the average author.
An obvious channel for alternative communication is the research blog. In
general, bloggers do not see their blogs as appropriate outlets for original
research
A new platform with interesting architecture is Scalar
An offline alternative to the RIP is the modern e-book. In contrast to what
its name suggests an e-book does not need to be of the same substantial size
of a printed book because of the lack of overhead printing costs. The first
generation of e-books consisted mainly of texts with a few gray-scale
illustrations, and e-readers based on
In fall 2011 Epub 3 was approved as recommendation
Currently, the Epub 3 standard is not widely supported by publishers and
e-reader manufacturers, which makes that in practice one may come across
some annoying hitches. Apple offers extensive and good-looking support in
the form of its proprietary iBooks format. The text can be interspersed with
interactive images, image galleries, video and audio. Touch Press
Conventional publishing is rather straightforward: there is a well-defined path starting from a Word file or Lateχ document based on templates to an HTML page and PDF. Enhanced publications add a linkage layer on top of this existing system and require users to hop from one piece of content to another. On the other hand, publishing an article in a digital format with integrated research data, a set of photos, videos, interactive maps or animations as with RIPs affects structure and layout of the publication itself and requires new technology. Making a choice one has to avoid at least four basic technical pitfalls:
Authors are lucky when their publisher has well organized the rich publication route as for example Elsevier did. This implies more than refreshing the journal system and providing updated templates. Careful instructions are needed how to submit multimedia material and, in addition, Elsevier offers a paid illustration service. Overlooking the various alternatives for self-publishing as discussed in the foregoing sections one must conclude that each of them has certain snags; there is no royal highway. Most authors will either need technical assistance or have to accept compromises; new, user-friendly tools are badly needed to fill the gap between the low end of WYSIWYG HTML editors and blog publishing on the one hand, and less flexible and less open full-fledged commercial systems on the other.
The Xpos’re project has its roots in handcrafted multimedia web applications
for research purposes, mainly made in Flash.
The Xpos’re software is free and is distributed under a non-commercial Creative Commons license and can be downloaded from http://xposre.nl which contains also a few examples of real publications (note, that the illustrations in this paper are based on a simple demo with brief pseudo-text kept short for the sake of clarity).
The main component of the Xpos’re package is a text browser, a Flash program, which primarily renders the text as a set of slides (see Figure 1) and which delegates the display of specific, mostly multimedia content to external components, the so-called extensions, which are similar to plug-ins of a web browser. These enhancements (in Flash or HTML-Javascript) may vary from zoomable images, image galleries, interactive maps, and videos to interactive data tables and statistical charts. The extensions are different in size, are launched through special event-hyperlinks and are displayed on top of the main text. The native Xpos’re Flash extensions can also interact through this type of links with the main text, for example, changing the slide displayed. In this way an image gallery can be used as a pictorial index through goto-event links in the captions of the gallery images; by clicking on the event-link a user can go to the slide where the image is discussed (see Figure 2). Xpos’re has been designed to work together with other web tools. Particularly the statistical market segment has companion software, which is worth to be used and, depending on the application interface, can also be used with Xpos’re as a less integrated extension.
In the basic display format the publication is a series of slides, each having a fixed layout of 950 x 720 pixels, which fits most common screens in landscape mode. It is not responsive, but there are options for more flexible HTML output, which we shall discuss later. A slide should correspond with a piece of text that is internally coherent, such as a section or subsection of an article. It may contain the full text or a summary, for example, if the Xpos’re publication is mainly intended to make supplementary material available. For this purpose each slide can be linked to the related page in the PDF file with the full text; then the linked page is displayed by a button click.
A slide can contain one or two text columns and images. Images are displayed
as a list outside the text blocks, unless, like in HTML, defined through an
img
tag and thus embedded in the text itself. The number of
images that fit on a slide depends on the size and orientation of the image
list, horizontal or vertical. How physical text layout affects reading from
screen is a thorny debate, which has produced a large number of
unfortunately inconclusive and slightly contradictive studies
The limited space does not necessarily restrict the amount of information
that can be displayed. If a text is larger than the predefined column, it is
scrollable, but choosing continuation text may be more user-friendly. A
slide can have one continuation text of unlimited length, in the Flash
version displayed in a popup window and in the HTML slide version as a new
screen. This helps to present main things first. Usability research has
shown that users prefer brief information before reading a full text and
appreciate facilities for rapid browsing
Flash was kept because of its robustness and high quality of accurate graphic rendering, which has proven to be consistent on different platforms over a long period of time. It should be emphasized that no content is embedded in the Flash file itself (which is still a common misunderstanding with regard to Flash applications): at startup all text and images are preloaded from the web server to guarantee good performance.
However, the user is in no way bound to Flash and can easily switch to HTML
output. The Flash text browser contains a code generator, which
automatically creates a look-alike HTML version of the Flash slides with
similar functionality to serve platforms where Flash is not supported (such
as the iPad). In the same way it can produce a plain HTML version with a
minimum of formatting suitable for printing, conversion to PDF and further
processing such as the creation of e-books through software as
Calibre.
This flexible HTML document can also be manipulated and displayed by other reader software. For example, the Xpos’re suite also comprises a highly customizable HTML Reader, which displays this text in a three column reflowable format (table of contents, main text and sidebar), similar to the layout of most digital scientific journals. It has more features than the automatically generated HTML slides and is particularly tablet friendly (see Figure 3). An additional advantage of this reader is that it accepts also other HTML texts (non-native XML) provided that basic formatting rules have been followed.
The cross-platform concept also applies to extensions. An important principle
in the Xpos’re architecture is
An Xpos’re publication consists of two main files: one containing the structured publication text and one with metadata and instructions for the Xpos’re software. A cascading style sheet (CSS) defines the layout in terms of colors, font family and font size. XML has been chosen for the mark-up of the content. The input must comply with an XML schema, which makes it easy to control and to validate text entry. In many respects the Xpos’re XML vocabulary is close to XHTML, particularly on the level of paragraph mark-up, but it contains non-HTML instructions, among others, for the control of the extensions mentioned.
The most direct form of authoring boils down to alternating between an XML editor
and the Xpos’re text browser, which shows immediately how the document rendered
looks. If the XML document is created on the basis of an existing publication,
text entry will be a matter of copy and paste. Other, more (semi‑) automated
workflows, which start for example from a Word text, are feasible as well. A
Word document saved as a (filtered) HTML text can be further cleaned by
conversion tools
The layout of each slide can fully meet the requirements of the particular content. The author can choose on which level he defines the position and size of the text and images. By default layout is controlled through user-defined templates. The advantage of this template mechanism is that it allows global changes for the entire text at once; modifying a template affects all the slides that use it. In addition, fixed layout is not hard coded in the text itself and may be even completely disregarded as, for example, with the reflowable HTML output in the HTML reader.
If required, the author can also locally specify precise size and position of
layout elements in the slide itself. A local specification precedes over the
template in use, in the same way as local style definitions have priority of a
linked style sheet in an HTML document. In this way images can also be
Slide text may contain two kinds of hyperlinks: (1) regular HTML-hyperlinks and
(2) internal event-links, which represent instructions for the text browser.
Documents linked to the publication text through the former type of links are
displayed in a target window (just like in HTML), but Xpos’re can also show them
as an overlay on a transparent background on top of the slide, which creates a
sense of unity in the user interface. The second type of link is used, among
others, for navigation: <a href="event:goto#intro">Lorem
ipsum</a>
will display the slide with the id-attribute having
the value intro
. Another use is calling an extension. For example, the
image viewer can be activated to show a larger, zoomable version of a picture by
adding the tag: <a
href="event:add#ImageViewer.swf#Tulip_field.jpg"
. Extensions linked through event links appear as pop-ups in the
Flash text browser, and as overlays in the HTML look-alike.
When ready, the text with all depending files is copied to a webserver, which completes the publishing process. There is no content management system or other back-end required. When published, this RIP can be aggregated with other content (e.g. related publications or data sets) into an enhanced publication. Xpos're also supports the generation of an OAI-ORE resource map (see section 1.2), which is automatically generated by means of an XSLT file, to be downloaded from the Xpos're website.
We did some small scale testing of the software in research projects. The
development of Xpos’re started as part of a larger collaboration project within
the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and got national attention in
the context of enhanced publications. The combination of both attracted some
volunteers, who wanted either to add an Xpos’re publication to an already
published paper or to use the package for a new, born-digital product. This
resulted in four
In all four cases the content production process went smoothly. The Berber dictionary, however, used a special text font, which required recompilation of the Flash text browser. During the encoding of the book about parks we offered some support for minor questions about image processing and how to create the best layout. Using Xpos’re for such a long text raised questions about search facilities, which are currently lacking in the text browser, because it was designed with texts of article size in mind. Furthermore, we could observe a tendency to stick to the basics and that more advanced features, such as the plugins, were not easily used.
Scholarly communication is in a process of transition and has not yet arrived at a steady state. Both users and publishers realize that the traditional genre of printed papers, even in digital form, does not suffice any longer and feel the need to publish supplements to the text. This has resulted in quite different digital solutions, varying from a multimedia section on a journal web site to enhanced PDF documents and semantic aggregations of articles plus other resources, but for most authors the way is not yet paved. Given the current state of scholarly publication, rich media publishing entails a set of difficulties and inconveniences that have to be dealt with:
The architectural concept of software has usually a much longer life than the
implementation, which is highly sensitive to changes in technology and market
positions. We all know spreadsheets, but only a few of us will remember Lotus
1-2-3, a highly popular spreadsheet and
A major goal has been a good-looking layout that integrates different types of
content, much better than with the
Information overload is discouraged by a combination of several features, which leads to dividing the content into layers. The first layer is the text on the slide, the next one the continuation text, and, if required, a third layer in the form of a PDF page linked to the slide. In the HTML Reader the sidebar can be used for digressions and short introductions of related subjects and videos that do not fit in the main text.
The variety of devices and screen resolutions has been addressed to a certain extent by a fixed layout that fits normal tablets and larger screens, and by the flexible layout of the HTML Reader. A future version should be more responsive, but downsizing for lower resolutions has its limits; hotspots as on an interactive map or timeline require a minimum size and spacing on touch devices.
The elements of the Xpos’re XML vocabulary are not standard, but the large overlap with HTML for sentence and paragraph mark-up and the ease of transformation of XML content make reuse relatively simple. A drawback is the basic knowledge of HTML, XML and CSS required for authoring. This may be inhibiting for scholars who want to stay far away from web technology; they will need some technical assistance. The barrier is not as serious as it may appear. In one of our pilots a large publication was rather easily encoded in XML by two persons who had only attended a short basic XML workshop and got a one-day instruction in Xpos’re software.
The Xpos’re architectural concept can be positioned between RIPs on basis content management systems as WordPress and modern e-books. Although quite different in many respects, all three of them are HTML-based and can be used to create publications with enhanced reading experience. Unlike WordPress Xpos’re is a completely client-side solution. The optional scripting in Epub 3 makes these e-books in principle more versatile and powerful (and also more complex!) than Xpos’re publications with extensions only. With regard to flexibility Xpos’re stands out by an easily reusable source text and a variety of output options.
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