Working on the Knowledge Base

Here in Bergen, we're hard at work developing the Knowledge Base, which is going to be a database offering bibliographic information about works of electronic literature as well as criticism and pedagogical resources. We're building it in Drupal, and feeding it more and more content to figure out how we want it to work. Although it still needs a lot of prettifying and some pretty heavy-duty interface redesign I'm already obsessed with this thing. Look, this is what makes me excited - I entered Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story, into the database (because I love it, and wrote my first ever academic paper on it) and then I added a few papers and books that I knew discussed afternoon. Now see what the entry page for afternoon looks like:

The layout is horrible, and you can barely parse that list to the right, but that's where the power is: it's a list of critical works in the Knowledge Base that reference Joyce's afternoon. Click any of them - say, Bernstein's "Patterns of Hypertext", and you can see bibliographic information about that paper as well as a linked list of creative works that that paper references: At the start of the Knowledge Base we're having to enter quite a lot of data - for a single paper like this, we have to also add six works that are discussed in the paper. Not just their titles, but complete information about each work. But that also means that our Knowledge Base is growing fast. And once a work has been entered, it's very easy to link it up to other works that reference it or that it references. Right now, the interface for entering works and the layout for viewing them is so clunky and unfinished that it's not quite ready to be opened up to the public. But there's a lot happening behind the scenes, and I'll try to give you glimpses once a week or so here on the blog. There are a lot of people working on this. PhD fellow Magnus Lawrie in Edinburgh and research assistent Elisabeth Nesheim here in Bergen are our design team. Our Drupal developer, Stein Magne Bjørklund, will be continuing to work on the backend. Eric Rasmussen is the editor of the Knowledge Base, and is developing style guides and leading the content side of the knowledge base. Scott Rettberg is leading the project and doing a bit of everything else as well, from fixing Drupal fields to entering content. Thomas Brevik is contributing his extensive knowledge of librarianship and bibliography. Patricia Tomaszek and I are entering content and hooking things up and by doing so testing (and breaking) the interface. In the next weeks we'll be working on the design, both of the ways we organise and display data entry and the readers' view of entries. And we'll be implementing a new category: pedagogical materials, where we'll be able to enter syllabi, lesson plans, classroom activities, assignment texts and so on and link them up to creative works and critical works discussed. I think this is going to be an amazing tool for teaching and research. We're also collaborating with the Electronic Literature Directory and other similar projects, such as the Sydney-based "Creative Nation: Writers and Writing in the New Media Culture" (a project led by Anna Gibbs and Maria Angel of UWS aimed at developing an online annotated directory of Australian new media writing) and Likumed (a research and teaching project continuing from the Media Upheavals research center located at the University of Siegen, with a particular focus in electronic literature). As you can see from our screenshots, we have different goals from the Electronic Literature Directory. They have fewer works in the database, but with very solid, well-written descriptions that are really mini-essays in their own right. The ELMCIP Knowledge base instead aims to show the connections between works - we want to catalogue everything connected to electronic literature and find out how it's all connected. Ambitious, yes, but hopefully once we've set it up well and fed a lot of content into it we'll convince enough people of its usefulness to them that there'll be a lot of us to continue adding to it as the field grows. We'll be inviting many more contributors as we go along - we hope that anyone who is interested will contribute. As you can see from the screenshots, we're not ready for a grand launch yet (this is barely in alpha yet, let alone beta) - but if you're very interested, we'd love for you to be involved. Send Eric an email (eric.rasmussen@lle.uib.no) and we'll set you up with an account so you can log in, see what's there, add some things and let us know how it can be improved.