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This document reflects the distributed administrative structure to be put into practice by the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) group for the purpose of governing itself as it carries out work on its Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI)-funded initiative. The INKE group consists of academic researchers, academic research partners (many invested as stakeholders as well), an international advisory board, a partners committee, individual research area groups (RAG) each with their own (co)leads who act as administrators for the group and form the overall RAG administrative group committee, and an executive committee (EC) that represents all areas of activity in the research endeavour and also includes an administrative/ management advisor (who carries out work and provides leadership on process, not research content) and a project manager. Taken as a whole, the structure of the group is an embodiment of the distributed administrative and authoritative principles that have evolved over the several years of the project's foundation, and the materials that follow have been assembled and authored by the entirety of the administrative team in that spirit. This document is also closely aligned with the processes outlined in two related documents: the annual calendar and the annual RAG planning process.

This working paper takes up Ursula Franklin’s concept of constructed reality, mentioned in her Massey Lectures, and expands upon her engagements with themes of power and technology as represented in literature, film, and other imaginative works. We consider what Ursula Franklin might have said about the power of fiction to shape our understanding of technology as practice, and take as our case study the 1962 novel and 1964 film Fail Safe, a Cold War-era dramatization of technological systems that threaten to cause an accidental nuclear war between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. We begin by analyzing Franklin’s (mostly passing) references to works of fiction, then turn to a close reading of Fail Safe through the lens of Franklin’s ideas, and conclude with a discussion of Cold War (techno)science-fiction as it relates to Franklin’s concerns about technology and militarism.

In this paper, we present the first year work of the INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) research group, a large international, interdisciplinary research team studying reading and texts, both digital and printed. The INKE team is comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefront of fields relating to textual studies, user experience, interface design, and information management. We aim to contribute to the development of new digital information and knowledge environments that build on past textual practices. We discuss our research questions, methods, aims and research objectives, the rationale behind our work and its expected significance –specifically as it pertains to our first year goals of laying a research foundation for this endeavour. We thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for funding a research cluster grant, which has made our research network possible, and the generous co-sponsorship of our institutions and research partners.

In most all things that exist at the intersection of several domains, domain-specific cultures have potential to collide, in useful ways as well as others. The book is such a thing—especially so, one might observe, in an age witnessing the book’s seeming redefinition in the midst of societal reconfiguration with respect to technologies and media of conveyance. As has been noted by many, Katherine Hales and Alan Galey among them, the advent of the electronic book, the e-book, has made the book itself visible to us as an object of study in new ways, ways that have, in quick succession, metaphorically and analogically fertilized and fomented our understanding of new forms of electronic-reader book-ishness and concomitant electronically-facilitated reading practices...

This article considers the role of textual studies in a digital world and reviews the work of a particular group of digital textual scholars. Specifically, the article examines the work of the Textual Studies team at the Implementing New Knowledge Environments project (INKE.ca), a group of digital textual scholars working on user experience, interface design, and information management with the goal of better understanding how reading is changing in the context of digital media. INKE’s work rethinks what the book can become and aims to generate prototypes to be shared on an open-source basis with the public.

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: This assignment teaches XML text encoding as a curatorial practice in which the remediation of a text yields insight into the text’s structure, meaning, and material form. In the context of the course as a whole, this curatorial experiment helps students understand how specific formats serve as “conceptual frameworks for knowledge” and also illuminates the relation between artifacts and the meaning they carry. Students are given freedom to make interpretive and representational choices but are asked to explain and justify those choices. This assignment could be easily adapted to a wide variety of courses and would work equally well with archival materials, literary and historical documents, manuscripts, and other artifacts that invite discussion of the relation between the physical carrier and the text.