Category Archives: commentpress

mlk in commentpress… and an offer

The other day a fellow named Nate Stearns posted a remark on the recent post about using CommentPress in classroom situations.

This is a great idea for AP Language and Comp classes where we naturally and habitually pick apart a wide variety of essays, histories, and journalism….I could imagine whole networks of overworked high school APers tearing apart, say, Thoreau’s Walden or King’s Letter from Birmingham jail.

As a test, I quickly threw together an edition of MLK’s famous epistle, throwing in also as an appendix the statement by eight Alabama clergyman to which it was responding.
mlkcommentpress.jpg
I’m repeating now our offer to repost, by request, this or any other available text on a unique CommentPress site dedicated to your high school or college class. It’s up to you whether we password-protect the site or leave it open. There’s a strong case to be made for insulating class discussion from public scrutiny, or worse, abuse -? especially in a high school context. In a collegiate setting, though, I can see why it might make sense to raise the stakes a bit, as Daniel Anderson suggested in another comment:

In teaching there is real leverage in having a group in place with motivation–the problem is that is extrinsic motivation in many case–grades. So, adding the public layer is really helpful in that it brings a complementary sense of creating something for others and, hopefully, internal motivation.

So there it is. We’re VERY eager to see CommentPress in action and so are offering this modest service of setting up installations. School is back in session, or will be any day now, so if you’d like us to set something up to kick off the year, drop us a note in the comments here, or email me at ben@futureofthebook.org. (Nate, just say the word and we’ll happily reproduce the MLK text for you.) Feel free to pick off the list we threw together last week, but by no means feel limited to that.
Incidentally, it was an interesting exercise breaking up King’s text into pages. The letter has no formally delineated sections but it does have about six distinct rhetorical “movements,” which I did my best to draw out here. If you request a CommentPress edition from us, feel free to be incredibly explicit as to how you’d like the text broken up and how you’d like the sections titled. For the Letter, I simply used quotations from the first sentence of paragraph of that section, which seems to do a decent job of indicating the essence of each of King’s arguments and hopefully to draw the reader in with the sound of his voice. Speaking of voice, there’s no free recording of King reading the whole Letter, but if there had been we could have easily included it as an optional audio track. If any of you have an audio version of the text you want to use, or images for that matter, point us to it/them and we might be able to work those in.

commentpress in the classroom

So CommentPress is out in the world and continues to develop in small ways (version 1.3 was put out last week), but there are still only a few observable cases apart from our own projects in which it’s been put to use. One thing we’d like to do with it is to set up a small library of public domain short stories, essays and poems for use in high school or college classes – ?CP is best geared for close readings and we’re very curious to see how this might come into play in a pedagogical context. We’d offer this as a free service to any teacher who was interested in trying it out: basically, set up a dedicated installation with the desired text and give it to their class as its own social edition. Note: when I posted this earlier today I had said only high school. This idea is still in gestation and all our conversations up to this point had focused, somewhat arbitrarily, on a high school scenario, but commenters rightly pointed out that this should be open to both primary and higher ed, and so it would be.
We threw together a short list of possible texts which you’ll find below. We can also see this being done with video clips where basically you break up a movie into small commentable chunks and embed them in place of a text. Granted, there are a variety of new video annotation tools hitting the web these days but nothing I’ve yet come across that does a good job of integrating comments by multiple viewers (anyone seen anything along these lines?).
Please shout out other appropriate titles and if you’re a teacher who’d be interested in experimenting with this, or know teachers who might be, please forward this along. Also, if you have ideas or suggestions for how this service ought to work, we’re all ears. This is just an initial floating out of the idea.
Swift, A Modest Proposal
US Constitution, Bill of Rights
The Magna Carta
MLK, Letter from Birmingham Jail (maybe not PD)
Lincoln, Gettsyburg Address
Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Paine, Common Sense
Emerson, Self-Reliance
Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
Plato, Apology/Phaedo/Crito
Montaigne, Of Friendship
Joyce, The Dead
Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener
Wharton, Roman Fever
Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown
Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
O’Henry, The Gift of the Magi
Jack London, To Build a Fire
Ambrose Bierce, Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Stephen Crane, The Open Boat
Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart, Fall of the House of Usher
Washington Irving, Sleepy Hollow
Arthur Conan Doyle, various
Kafka, The Judgement
Tolstoy, Death of Ivan Ilych
Emily Dickinson, selection
Whitman, selection
Poe, The Raven
Blake, Songs of Innocence/Experience, selection
Wordsworth, selection
Donne, selection
Robert Frost, from Boy’s Will/North of Boston
Shakespeare sonnets, selection
(With poetry it would make sense to put comments on each line. I can imagine a nice edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets working this way.)

ithaka university publishing report in commentpress

The Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library has just released an interactive, CommentPress-powered edition of “University Publishing In A Digital Age,” the Ithaka report that in recent weeks has sent ripples through the scholarly publishing community. Please spread the word and take part in the discussion that hopefully will unfold there:
http://scholarlypublishing.org/ithakareport/
Incidentally, this site uses the just-released version 1.3 of CommentPress, which I’ll talk more about tomorrow. Here’s the intro from the good folks at Michigan (thanks especially to Maria Bonn and Shana Kimball for taking the initiative on this):

On July 26, 2007, Ithaka released “University Publishing In A Digital Age.” The report has been met with great interest by the academic community and has already engendered a great deal of lively discussion.
Coincidentally, that same week, the Institute For the Future of the Book released CommentPress, an online textual annotation tool with great promise for promoting scholarly discussion and collaboration.
At the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library we have watched both of these developments with keen interest. Our work as online scholarly publishers, our role as publisher of the Journal of Electronic Publishing and our close affiliation with the University of Michigan Press through our joint initiative, digitalculturebooks, directs us to paying close attention to both the conditions and tools of scholarly publishing.
The happy simultaneity of the release of the Ithaka Report and CommentPress prompted us to view the report as ideal material with which to experiment with CommentPress. With the gracious cooperation of the authors of the report, we have created a version of “University Publishing In A Digital Age” which invites public commentary and which we hope will serve as a basis for further discussions in our community.
In the words of the authors, “this paper argues that a renewed commitment to publishing in its broadest sense can enable universities to more fully realize the potential global impact of their academic programs, enhance the reputations of their institutions, maintain a strong voice in determining what constitutes important scholarship, and in some cases reduce costs.” We welcome you to engage in that argument in this space.

commentpress classics fantasy football

Following last week’s discussions on a hypothetical digital Ulysses (1, 2), numerous ideas for electronic dream editions have been coming out of the woodwork, including this proposal from our good friend John Holbo of The Valve. John’s agreed to let us repost it here – ?I think this could be a terrific CommentPress collab.

Here’s an idea for you: Ulysses, as I am sure you know, may be a problematic text for copyright reasons (sad to say, but it’s true.)
I have a counter-proposal: Frankenstein. (Really a supplementary proposal. I’m not counter the other thing, by any means.)
Advantage: two editions, 1818, 1831. Substantially different. So there is some notation to be done.
Advantage: I’ve already painstakingly made a clean electronic edition of the 1831 edition by taking the substantially screwed up Project Gutenberg edition (really it’s a mess) and copy editing it up with respect to an old, but respectable public domain edition. Took me a long time to do the cleaning, dozens of hours. I was picking up typos for weeks. I am planning to just let it go free one way or the other. It currently exists as a set of MS-Word files. Maybe someone would like to take it and do up a nice CommentPress edition.
We’re thinking of doing a book event at the Valve, discussing the novel’s debated status as the first SF novel. I thought we could call it: The Structure of Mad Scientific Revolutions. That could create a mass of scholarly matter, albeit in the form of essays rather than stuff that would appropriately be displayed side-by-side with the text.
I have proposed to Parlor Press doing a paper edition, under CC release… Obviously that would be consistent with doing something a bit more ambitious. One thing I thought would be fun: try to encourage artists to contribute illustrations. Collect a whole bunch of illustrations of Frankenstein and have that as a possible display, side by side with the text.
Also, try to get SF authors to contribute in some way. What do they think of the original SF novel? Make it not just academic that way.
The suggestion isn’t to scuttle Ulysses but to do something else in addition. Since I’ve already made a basic text, which I am happy to hand over for free, it wouldn’t be hard to get something up and running. Also, it would be an attractive thing for the Institute to have: the web’s only decent online edition of the 1831 edition of Frankenstein. (Also there must be some nice metaphor to be had about how these collaborative projects are sort of Frankenstein monsters themselves. Call it the Frankenstein Project. Something.)
Cheers,
JH

Sebastian Mary replied with another idea:

…if I were playing Commentpress Classics fantasy football the title I’d like to see networked would be Pope’s Dunciad. Its subject-matter is the step change in volume of printed matter appearing as a result of the early C18 print boom, and the writer’s concern about the onset of an age of ‘dullness’ brought about by the surge in hack writing: pretty much the same anxiety as that articulated by print publishers about digital text.
Formally, it’d work wonderfully, as it’s a very lateral text anyway: the later edition is elaborately footnoted – and because of the very specific references to historical places and people many of these themselves need explicatory footnotes.
There’s a kind-of-hypertext version here: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/dunciad4.html#8 – I can’t help daydreaming about what it’d be like if you it was in Commentpress so that you could add to each footnote, sprout new arguments, proliferate the text to infinity. Perhaps I just like the ironies in all this, but I think it would be beautiful…
M

The thread is open so please feel encouraged to float your own proposals, not just for CommentPress-based projects but for anything you can imagine being done with digital networked forms.

commentpress update

The release of CommentPress has made for exciting times here at the institute (the feedback has also been very encouraging). But as with any piece of software, CommentPress will need constant tending, and with quick succession upgrades, we hope to address the most crucial issues – starting with the first major update, CommentPress version 1.1.
This is a very important update, so everyone is encouraged to upgrade as soon as possible.
For a complete list of the changes, check out the CommentPress download page.

CommentPress 1.0

At long last, we are pleased to release CommentPress, a free, open source theme for the WordPress blog engine designed to allow paragraph-by-paragraph commenting in the margins of a text. To download it and get it running in your WordPress installation, go to our dedicated CommentPress site. There you’ll find everything you need to get started. This 1.0 release represents the most basic out-of-the-box version of the theme. Expect many improvements and new features in the days and weeks ahead (some as soon as tomorrow). We could have kept refining it for another week but we felt that the time was well past due to get it out in the world and to let the community development cycles begin. So here it is:
/commentpress/ »
This little tool is the happy byproduct of a year and a half spent hacking WordPress to see whether a popular net-native publishing form, the blog, which, most would agree, is very good at covering the present moment in pithy, conversational bursts but lousy at handling larger, slow-developing works requiring more than chronological organization – ?whether this form might be refashioned to enable social interaction around long-form texts. Out of this emerged a series of publishing experiments loosely grouped under the heading “networked books.” The first of these, McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1, was a wildly inventive text whose aphoristic style and modular structure lent it readily to “chunking” into digestible units for online discussion. This is how it ended up looking:
gamertheory500.jpg
In the course of our tinkering, we achieved one small but important innovation. Placing the comments next to rather than below the text turned out to be a powerful subversion of the discussion hierarchy of blogs, transforming the page into a visual representation of dialog, and re-imagining the book itself as a conversation. Several readers remarked that it was no longer solely the author speaking, but the book as a whole (author and reader, in concert).
Toying with the placement of comments was relatively easy to do with Gamer Theory because of its unusual mathematical structure (25 paragraphs per chapter, 250 words or lessper paragraph), but the question remained of how this format could be applied to expository texts of more variable shapes and sizes. The breakthrough came with Mitchell Stephens’ paper, The Holy of Holies: On the Constituents of Emptiness. The solution we found was to have the comment area move with you in the right hand column as you scrolled down the page, changing its contents depending on which paragraph in the left hand column you selected. This format was inspired in part by a WordPress commenting system developed by Jack Slocum and by the Free Software Foundation’s site for community review of drafts of the GNU General Public License. Drawing on these terrific examples, we at last managed to construct a template that might eventually be exported as a simple toolset applicable to any text.
holyofholies500.jpg
Ever since “Holy of Holies,” people have been clamoring for us to release CommentPress as a plugin so they could start playing with it, improving it and customizing it for more specialized purposes. Now it’s finally here, with a cleaned-up codebase and a simpler interface, and we can’t wait to see how people start putting it to use. We can imagine a number of possibilities:
-? scholarly contexts: working papers, conferences, annotation projects, journals, collaborative glosses
-? educational: virtual classroom discussion around readings, study groups
-? journalism/public advocacy/networked democracy: social assessment and public dissection of government or corporate documents, cutting through opaque language and spin (like our version of the Iraq Study Group Report, or a copy of the federal budget, or a Walmart press release)
-? creative writing: workshopping story drafts, collaborative storytelling
-? recreational: social reading, book clubs
Once again, there are dozens of little details we want to improve, and no end of features we would love to see developed. Our greatest hope for CommentPress is that it take on a life of its own in the larger community. Who knows, it could provide a base for something far more ambitious.
An important last thought, however. While CommentPress presents exciting possibilities for social reading and writing on the Web, it is still very much bound by its technical origins, the blog. This presents significant limitations both in the flexibility of document structures and in the range of media that can be employed in writing and response. Sure, even in the current, ultra-basic version, there’s no reason a CommentPress document can’t incorporate image, video and sound embeds, but they must be fit into the narrow and brittle textual template dictated by the blog.
All of which is to say that we do not view CommentPress or whatever might grow out of it as an end goal but rather as a step along the way. In fact, this and all of the experiments mentioned above were undertaken in large part as field research for Sophie, and they have had a tremendous impact on its development. While there is still much work to be done, the ultimate goal of the Sophie project is to make a tool that handles all the social network interactions (and more) that CommentPress does but within a far more fluid and easy-to-use composition/reading space where media can mix freely. That’s the larger prize. For the moment though, let’s keep hacking the blog to within an inch of its life and seeing what we can discover.
A million thanks go out to our phenomenal corps of first-run testers, particularly Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Karen Schneider, Manan Ahmed, Tom Keays, Luke Rodgers, Peter Brantley and Shana Kimball, for all the thoughtful and technically detailed feedback they’ve showered upon us over the past few days. Thanks to you guys, we’re getting this out of the gate on solid legs and our minds are now churning with ideas for future development.
Here is a chronology of CommentPress projects leading up to the open source release (July 25, 2007):
GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1 by McKenzie Wark (launched May 22, 2006)
The Holy of Holies: On the Constituents of Emptiness by Mitchell Stephens (December 6, 2006)
The Iraq Study Group Report with Lapham’s Quarterly (December 21, 2006)
The President’s Address to the Nation, January 10th, 2007 with Lapham’s Quarterly (together, the Address and the ISG Report comprised Operation Iraqi Quagmire) (January 10, 2007)
The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age with HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) (January 17, 2007)
Scholarly Publishing in the Age of the Internet by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, published at MediaCommons (March 30, 2007)
(All the above are best viewed in Firefox. The new release works in all major browsers and we’re continuing to work on compatibility.)

a quick note on commentpress

Apologies to all who have been waiting so patiently for CommentPress (our open source theme for WordPress that enables paragraph-level commenting on blogs and other documents). Many of you have told us about specific projects you’re dying to start if only you had the plugin… Believe me, we can’t wait to get it out into the world so people can start playing with it (and improving it). We’re sorry this has gotten so delayed.
Unfortunately, what with Sophie, MediaCommons and the pressing task of raising more funds to keep the Institute going, finishing up CommentPress keeps getting relegated to the back burner. Add to that a more or less lost month of June with many of our number scattered around the world for weddings and long overdue vacations (I’m writing this from South Korea).
The good news is that we’ve been making progress all along, slowly but surely cleaning up the code, streamlining the interface, and making a simple, clean out-of-the-box design. It looks like we’re nearly there. I can say with 99% confidence that we’ll have this puppy ready by mid-July, probably sometime in the week of the 16th through 20th.
Thanks again for your patience. We’ll have this for you soon.
(Reposted from comments.)

MediaCommons paper up in commentable form

We’ve just put up a version of a talk Kathleen Fitzpatrick has been giving over the past few months describing the genesis of MediaCommons and its goals for reinventing the peer review process. The paper is in CommentPress — unfortunately not the new version, which we’re still working on (revised estimated release late April), it’s more or less the same build we used for the Iraq Study Group Report. The exciting thing here is that the form of the paper, constructed to solicit reader feedback directly alongside the text, actually enacts its content: radically transparent peer-to-peer review, scholars talking in the open, shepherding the development each other’s work. As of this writing there are already 21 comments posted in the page margins by members of the editorial board (fresh off of last weekend’s retreat) and one or two others. This is an important first step toward what will hopefully become a routine practice in the MediaCommons community.
In less than an hour, Kathleen will be delivering the talk, drawing on some of the comments, at this event at the University of Rochester. Kathleen also briefly introduced the paper yesterday on the MediaCommons blog and posed an interesting question that came out of the weekend’s discussion about whether we should actually be calling this group the “editorial board.” Some interesting discussion ensued. Also check at this: “A First Stab at Some General Principles”.

commentpress update

Since we launched Holy of Holies last year, we’ve made a lot of progress with the paragraph-level commenting system we’ve been building on top of WordPress. We’ve taken to calling it “Commentpress,” and until we get significant pushback (or a great alternative suggestion), we’re sticking with it. This is a pre-announcement to say that we’re pursuing plans to open it up as a plugin for WordPress in March (middle to end of the month).
The original instantiation was put together very quickly over the course of a week and was the dictionary definition of a hack. Still, we knew we had something that was worthwhile from the feedback we received, and we were excited to figure out the next step for Commentpress. That was almost two months ago. In that time, we’ve launched three other sites in Commentpress (1 2 3). Each new installation has seen additions and refinements to the Commentpress functionality. But we haven’t released it.
Why the delay? It’s not because we are reluctant to let it go. No, it’s just that we feel a responsibility to present a project that is ready for the community to act upon. And that means taking a good crack at it ourselves: we want to have a minimum level of ease of use in the installation, a little documentation, and a code package that looks like something constructed by humans rather than something that crawled out from the primordial ooze. That will take a little time due to all the other projects and launches we’ve got throughout the spring. We’re also spending time trying to figure out how to manage an open-source project. Since we’ve never really done it before, suggestions, case studies, horror stories, and revealing of miracles are welcome.
Thanks for your patience, and we’ll keep you informed.