Reading with the crowd: InfiniteUlysses.com & designing social interfaces for public literature participation

Amanda Visconti
Purdue University

What if we build a digital literary edition and invite everyone? What if millions of not just scholars, but also first-time readers, book clubs, teachers and their students, and literary enthusiasts show up and annotate a text with their "infinite" interpretations, questions, and contextualizations? InfiniteUlysses.com, a participatory platform for reading and socially annotating James Joyce's challenging novel Ulysses, uses design, coding, and usertesting to research how digital humanities interfaces can
1. handle heavy interest and activity from public readers and their annotations
2. balance algorithmic and community curation to match displayed annotations to readers' differing interests, needs, and backgrounds
3. make this participation meaningful for both site users and researchers
4. move the conversation from "general" public audiences to more realistically reachable specific user personas

Presentation (PDF File)

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