1. Tools of Change for Publishing: The great O’Reilly blog.
2. ReadWriteWeb: useful, if slightly overwhelming, analysis of products and trends.
3. The discovery blog: The blog of my old company, Semantico, always contains really useful and practical posts. Recent posts have been on online identity, accessibility and QA.
4. eConsultancy blog: digital marketing in the broadest sense, and they publish some very good reports.
5. Copyblogger: because writing for the web is so important.
6. if:book: Institute for the Future of the Book.
7. A List Apart: “explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.”
8. InfoDesign: Understanding by Design: News items relating to information design, user experience etc.
9. Museum 2.0: Not obviously relevant, but I love the parallels and connections between publishing and the museum world and Nina Simon’s blog always makes me think about other ways of doing things.
10. History Compass Theory & Methods Blog: Again, it might not be a “digital publishing” blog, but the different perspective is refreshing, and it is one of my connections with digital humanities and history which I’ve enjoyed for years.

Yesterday John Lavagnino (KCL) and I took part in the London Shakespeare Seminar at the School of Advanced Studies at the University of London, talking about digital Shakespeares. Both of us took the opportunity to look back at what has happened over the last couple of decades to better understand the challenges and constraints in developing digital Shakespeare resources. I’m writing up the talk in a more extended form, so hope to make that available at some point in the future, but for the moment here are the slides, though Slideshare seems to have done something with the formatting of the timelines.

I’ve been lucky to have an interesting few months with some lovely clients and projects. First off was a London-based corporation who needed some consultancy advice on a taxonomy and metadata strategy. They have a huge amount of data from lots of different sources, and a pressing need to integrate it together for users to be able to draw greater benefit from it, whether through a conventional classification, using an existing thesaurus or even developing the folksonomies they already have. I gave them a roadmap for the next stages, and a pragmatic sense of where they could end up.

Then it was back to the more familiar academic publishing environment for some project planning. The new project needed to be started urgently, so I’ve spent the last couple of months working with the extremely bright publishing team to pull together the outline requirements for an exciting new service to be launched next year. Despite a subject area with which I was relatively unfamiliar, it proved to be a fascinating resource, with an extremely innovative back-end system for linking data. Nice to know I can still throw in a few quirky insights that add something challenging to a project…

And finally, there’s the data. I’ve always enjoyed the data side of digital publishing, ever since I managed the editorial and the technical ends of projects at Routledge in the 90s when it was clear that to manage data well it really helped to have a detailed understanding of what it does, and of the fine attention to picky detail that proofing and copy-editing gives you. Consequently, I’ve done lots of modelling and converting publishers’ data over the years, so it was a pleasure to have to convert some very lightly-HTML-tagged encyclopedia data to rather more robust TEI markup using XSLT. The highlights this time have been the rather extensive use of the for-each-group and inordinate complex regexes in analyze-string to add structure to the bibliographies so that OpenURL linking might work. Needless to say, Michael Kay’s book is always by my side.

I’ve been asked to talk to the MA Publishing students at the University of the Arts in London again. In the past I’ve focussed more on the mechanics of digital publishing, outlining what the process of putting content online looks like and that has gone down very well. This time, though, I’m thinking that it might be interesting to address other angles as well.

One way of coming at it could be by looking at what issues are we trying to solve by making it available digitally in the first place. Of course it’s about protecting revenue streams, and of finding new ones, but there’s also the opportunities to enhance the offering, through linked data, other media, better pedagogical support, and by working with the community of users. Each of these force us to look back at the objectives of the publishing project, perhaps modify them, and assess whether we can get the technology to deliver.

I’m also mindful of the changes in the way that the spaces we work in are being re-described. Not only does “publishing” as an activity now seem to cover a much broader range of people and content than was the case, say thirty years ago, but I know I’ve described myself as an “information professional” on occasion, and we attend trade shows which focus on “Online Information” and “Knowledge Management”. While these labels have their purpose, they’re not synonymous with “publishing”; not all publishing is informational and fact-based. There’s the whole evaluative and narrative side to content as well, and that doesn’t respond to the same kind of digital treatment as patents, dictionaries and pharmaceutical data.

Furthermore, in thinking about the transition from print to online, though the benefits can be considerable, what are we in danger of losing? Is it important? If we wind the clock back a bit further, in previous transitions, be it from manuscript to print, or indeed from oral culture to the written, what was lost then? And, if they might be important, could those features too be reinstated in some form in a digital universe?

I’d love to hear your thoughts, and if you know of some useful materials that I could read around this whole area, please let me know or add a comment.

Outsourcing is no bad thing; it’s what publishers do, and it works well. But, in the digital domain, if done to excess it can feel as though the publisher abdicates responsibility for their digital business, placing in the hands of a third party technology company, thereby letting the technology drive the business, rather than the other way round.

I’m certainly a beneficiary of that outsourcing, and my current clutch of clients tend to be among those publishers who have a good range of skills for electronic publishing, but even they would admit that there are always holes and gaps in understanding and practice that get pushed to one side amid the daily routine of getting new products to market.

I can understand some of the gaps. After all, why would many publishers want to get too heavily involved with XML schemas, but at least some basic XML knowledge should be mandatory these days, if only for fixing typos.

So, I’d be interested to know where you see the gaps, either in your own skill-set, of your business, or of some of your competitors?

1. Neilan, Catherine. “Digital skills gap now ‘critical’ for publishers.” 14 August 2009. The Bookseller. http://www.thebookseller.com/news/94322-digital-skills-gap-now-critical-for-publishers.html.rss. The Skillset report was also the basis of a piece in the Guardian, though its headline seems to have somewhat misrepresented the substance of the findings: Holmwood, Leigh. “Literacy level of recruits now a major concern for media, report finds.” 13 August 2009. The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/13/literacy-concerns-media-recruits-skillset-report

After working on a number of online dictionary and reference projects over the years, it’s always nice to see some neat innovations. OUP have just made some of their wonderful Oxford Paperback Reference titles available on the iPhone. Maybe it’s time I got that gadget.

I was also excited to read the ReadWriteWeb item about Wordnik[1]. It may not include the breadth and currency of other online dictionaries, but it has creatively pulled together a lovely range of supporting materials in a nice user experience. It shows how effectively you can utilise data that is available via APIs from other sources. Its dictionaries include American Heritage Dictionary, Websters (1913) and a few others, but what makes it exciting is the other items: the examples from texts at Project Gutenberg; thesaurus items; Twitter usages; pictures from Flickr; a graphical view of the occurrence of the word over time; etymology; and pronunciation. Users can add their own notes, as well as pronunciation examples. No doubt more funky features will get added. Do other dictionary publishers need to raise their game?

1. Lardinois, Frederic. “Enamored With Words? You’ll Love Wordnik.” 9 June 2009. ReadWriteWeb http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/enamored_words_youll_love_wordnik.php

Finally catching up on some reading, I saw the piece in the Guardian about how Tim Berners-Lee is to help the UK government make its data more easily available online[1]. This can only be a good thing for helping to get the awareness out there, not only of how to do it, but also that it can work. The Linked Data initiative certainly has some useful material on making it happen, and the spring report from PriceWaterhouseCoopers also focuses on the semantic web and how some businesses such as the BBC are now beginning to engage with it.

Last week at the Semantic Technology conference held in San Jose the keynote from Tom Tague of Thomson Reuters’ OpenCalais gave a useful introduction to the trends in this very interesting area.[2] There should be more details about many of the papers and other talks appearing on the conference website soon.

Making a start with the semantic web should be getting easier, as the recent announcement about Google Rich Snippets made clear, though as Richard Padley noted in his blog, Google’s use of RDFa is not completely kosher.[3] In parallel with that development, Common Tag has also opened up an RDFa-based means of getting a decentralised interoperability between tags.[4]

How far have you got with your engagement with the semantic web? I’d be interested to know to what extent publishers are starting to put a toe in the water.

1. Arthur, Charles. “Web inventor to help Downing Street open up government data.” 10 June 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/10/berners-lee-downing-street-web-open
2. MacManus, Richard. “The State of the Market in Semantic Technologies.” 16 June 2009. ReadWriteWeb. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_state_of_the_market_in_semantic_technologies.php
3. Padley, Richard. “What does Google’s RDFa support mean for publishers?” 18 May 2009. The Discovery Blog. http://blogs.semantico.com/discovery-blog/2009/05/what-does-googles-rdfa-support-mean-for-publishers/
4. O’Dell, Jolie. “Common Tag Brings Standards to Metadata.” 10 June 2009. ReadWriteWeb http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/common_tag_brings_standards_to_metadata.php

In Oxford yesterday and couldn’t quite believe this one outside the George Inn in Botley. I had to go back to have another look and then got snarled at by a cyclist since I was rather distracted by the migrating character. I’ve not seen this particular occurrence before, though maybe someone in the Atrocious Apostrophe’s group on flickr has.

Certainly, the volume of data for individual projects has increased, which in turn has meant that publishers have got a bit better at managing and archiving their data assets, though I wish that were more generally true; valuable data can still be stored in the equivalent of a shoe box with inadequate documentation. Suppliers are generally better (and cheaper) too, not least since they now have more familiarity with the important data standards. Even so, data testing and QA can still be problematic, and that is equally true internally within publishers.

Compared with a decade ago, the user requirements and expectations tend to inform data design more, and some publishers certainly have well-thought-out and documented data models that have been constructed with usage in mind. But, the technology platform that delivers the content can sometimes be what shapes the data, rather than the user, and that can lead to some ugly and inflexible choices.

Nevertheless, when faced with a new data creation or migration project, there is still an unavoidably large amount of grind and planning required to get it right. That’s what I found so interesting re-reading these ten-year-old articles. Though the delivery technology has changed, the processes and thinking required isn’t very different, and I could have written similar things about many of the projects I’ve worked on since then.

The articles themselves date back to when I was digital publisher at Routledge in the late 90s. One describes the creation of Asia: Official British Documents (1998)¹, which was published with the British National Archives, and comprised 40,000 page images of original archive content plus metadata; and the second focuses on the data of the Calendar of State Papers Colonial series (1999).²

The former was mostly an exercise in tracking bits of paper in a database, but the latter was an SGML implementation, drawing on the models of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and the Model Editions Partnership. In the years since then I’ve been extending the TEI for several other projects, such as  the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, and the MLA Handbook, which has meant adding in MathML and the CALS table model. Fundamentally though, the process for planning and creating the data for these products hasn’t changed much at all.

1. Scott, Brad. “Creating an Image Edition of Historical Material: Asia: Official British Documents, 1945-1965″ 1998. http://www.brambletye-publishing.co.uk/consultancy/creating-an-image-edition-of-historical-material/
2. Scott, Brad. “Retrospective Data Conversion in a Commercial Publishing Environment: The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial” 1999. http://www.brambletye-publishing.co.uk/consultancy/retrospective-data-conversion-in-a-commercial-publishing-environment/
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