Online, open-access, and peer-reviewed journal Digital Studies/Le champ numérique has published a detailed article by ANVC Info Design Director, Craig Dietrich, and NEH-Vectors Summer Institute alum, Jentery Sayers (Assistant Professor, English; Director, Maker Lab in the Humanities; University of Victoria), on scholarly communication and digital asset management. The article, “After the Document Model for Scholarly Communication: Some Considerations for Authoring with Rich Media”, includes a case study approach to ThoughtMesh, a Vectors Journal-produced project launched in 2005 that incorporates a tag-based system for linking academic writing across the internet. ThoughtMesh was created with Dietrich and others on the team, and the linked-data concepts from that project carry over to Scalar, which is built upon a semantic web architecture that Sayers and Dietrich address extensively in their article. For instance, in “After the Document Model,” they write the following about the Resource Description Framework (RDF):

As a technology, RDF is applicable to scholarly communications for both practical and philosophical reasons. In the case of Scalar, it helps the platform facilitate traces, citations, and views that have already been developed by the semantic web community. Practically, it offers a flexible way to model data from multiple sources and to contextualise material based on ontologies. Philosophically, it provides a solution distinct from the relational systems prevalent on the web today, and it is a device for expressing information derived from a variety of locations or structures.

Scalar’s flexible architecture facilitates a responsible use of media assets from partner archives. Gone is the need for authors to spend time writing detailed citations of media assets like images, audio, video, and code snippets. Rather, Scalar will automatically create citations (subject, of course, to revision or editing) for each imported asset. This way, proper sharing practices are embedded in the authoring process. In “After the Document Model,” Sayers and Dietrich continue:

[A]uthors are not creating small, isolated archives on the Scalar server. Although they can upload their own videos, audio, and images to that space, they are instead encouraged to house them with a partner archive. Or, in the case where assets are already online, they are encouraged to embed those assets in their Scalar projects. That way, systems point to existing URIs rather than duplicating resources and producing redundancies. Here, the advantage is that media playback is overseen by groups that not only have institutional support but also specialise in metadata, asset categorisation, provenance, and interoperability.

Read the full article at http://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies/article/view/234/301.