Novelle, a Collaborative Open Source Writing Tool Software
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Novelle, a collaborative open source writing tool software Federico Gobbo Michele Chinosi Massimiliano Pepe DICOM DICOM DICOM 21100, Insubria University 21100, Insubria University 21100, Insubria University Varese, Italy Varese, Italy Varese, Italy [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract forms of writings arose. For example, when books shouldn’t be copied by hand any longer, authors In this paper we discuss the notions of hy- took the advantage and start writing original books pertext, blog, wiki and cognitive mapping and evaluation – i.e. literary criticism – unlike in in order to find a solution to the main prob- the previous times (Eisenstein, 1983). Nowadays lems of processing text data stored in these the use of computers for writing has drammati- forms. We propose the structure and archi- cally changed, expecially after their interconnec- tecture of Novelle as a new environment tion via the internet, since at least the foundation to compose texts. Its flexible model al- of the web (Berners-Lee, 1999). For example, a lows the collaboration for contents and a ‘web page’ is more similar to an infinite canvas detailed description of ownership. Data than a written page (McCloud, 2001). Moreover, are stored in a XML repository, so as to what seems to be lost is the relations, like the tex- use the capabilities of this language. To ture underpinning the text itself. From a positive develop quickly and efficiently we choose point of view these new forms of writing may real- AJAX technology over the Ruby on Rails ize the postmodernist and decostructionist dreams framework. of an ‘opera aperta’ (open work), as Eco would define it (1962). From a more pessimistic one, an 1 Introduction author may feel to have lost power in this open- Computational linguists are facing the explosion ness. Henceforth the collaborative traits of blogs of new forms of writing as a mass phenomenon. and wikis (McNeill, 2005) emphasize annotation, Telling personal and collaborative stories throught comment, and strong editing. They give more web technologies is known under the etiquettes of power to readers, eventually filling the gap - the ‘blog’ and ‘wiki’. It therefore brings new chal- so-called active readers become authors as well. lenges to the field of natural language processing. This situation could make new problems rise up: We are trying to address them by rendering explic- Who owns the text? Which role is suitable for au- itly the structure of these new forms of text in a thors? We have to analyse them before presenting way suitable for linguistic computation. In order the architecture of Novelle. to do so, we are building an open source writing tool software, called Novelle. 1.2 Known problems It is certainly true that wikis and blogs are new 1.1 Hypertext as a New Writing Space forms of text. It is also true that we have already Bolter (1991) was the first scholar who stressed met these problems in the first form of purely dig- the impact of the digital revolution to the medium ital texts – hypertexts. Now we are facing the of writing. Terms as ‘chapter’, ‘page’ or ‘foot- same question during processing texts in blogs and note’ simply become meaningless in the new texts, wikis. We consider hypertexts as parents of blogs or they highly change their meaning. When and wikis. Our aim is to use the analysis of hyper- Gutenberg invented the printing press and Aldo texts for interesting insights, useful for blogs and Manuzio invented the book as we know it, new wikis too. 40 Following the example of Landow (1994), we History snapshots of the timeline may be con- will call the autonomous units of a hypertext lex- sidered as permanent views, i.e. views with a ias (from ‘lexicon’), a word coined by Roland timestamp. Consequently, except in the case of Barthes (1970). Consequently, a hypertext is a set sandboxes, every change in the document cannot of lexias. In hypertexts transitions from one lexia be erased. This model will have a strong impact to another are not necessarily sequential, but nav- on the role of links and on the underpinning struc- igational. The main problems of hypertexts, ac- ture of Novelle itself. knowledged since the beginning, have been traced as follows (Nelson, 1992): 2 The Structure of Novelle • The framing problem, i.e. creating arbitrary Our aim is to create an open source hypertext mod- closed contexts of very large document col- eling software, called Novelle. ‘Novelle’ is an Ital- lections. When extracting sub-collections, ian old-fashioned word meaning ‘novels’, and in some links may be cut off. German it means ‘novel’ too. It resembles the En- glish word ‘novel’ and the French word ‘nuovelle’. • Comparing complex alternatives, i.e. to get We believe that this name is clearly understable to parallel or alternate versions of the same doc- every people educated in a European-based cul- ument in a simple and effective way, one of ture, and this is why we have chosen it. the main goal of Xanadu, the ultimate “global The emphasis on narrativity takes into account hypertext” dreamt by Nelson. the use of blogs as public diaries on the web, that is still the main current interpretation of this lit- • Typology of links, i.e. when links become too erary genre, or metagenre (McNeill, 2005). Fur- many, we need a typology for links, avoiding thermore we noticed that blogs and wikis are cur- confusion to the reader/author. rently subjected to osmosis, because they have in common the underlying core technology. So blogs • Version control, as the system should keep are a literary metagenre which started as authored track of the history of every document, sav- personal diaries or journals. Now they try to col- ing differences and pointing out correspon- lect themselves in so-called ‘blogspheres’. On the dencies. other side, wikis started as collective works where We take from wikis the concept of document each entry is not owned by a single author - e.g. history and its consequences. We consider it as a Wikipedia (2005). Now personal wiki tools are good approximation of the ‘version control’ con- arising for brainstorming and mind mapping. See cept as shown above. Section 4 for further aspects. In wikis every document keeps track of its own 2.1 The Problem of Ownership history: creating a document means to start a his- tory, editing a document to move ahead, restoring The main difference between blogs and wikis is to move back onto the history timeline, destroying in the ownership of documents. Most blogs fol- a document to stop the history itself. Moreover, low the annotation model, where a single lexia is a sandbox is a temporary view of a document it- central and the others are comments, sometimes self - i.e. a sandbox can not cause a change in the in threads. Every lexia is authored and changes history (Cunningham and Leuf, 2001). Figure 1 are minimal. People prefer commenting instead of shows the model. editing. The paradigm is “write once, read many”. On the contrary, in wikis no lexia is authored a very old an old the current the last version version version version and there is no hierarchy between lexias. In fact a document is still a set of lexias, but every docu- the document ment is only the set of historical versions of the creation destruction history timeline document itself. Generally, people avoid com- an edit a restore menting, preferring to edit each document. The sandbox paradigm is “write many, read many” (Cunning- ham and Leuf, 2001). We believe that ownership has an important role Figure 1: The document history model and we do not want to force our users to take a 41 non-attributive copyright licence to their work. We owned by a special user, called Public Domain. If consider the Creative Commons model as the most the author refuses the permission to create deriva- suitable one to let each author choose the rights tive works, i.e. to edit his own lexias, users still to reserve (Lessig, 2004). Narrative writings or have the right to comment the author’s work. So essays are creative works and they generally treat as to come to terms with this idea, we need a con- ownership as authorship, even for the most enthu- cept invented by Nelson (1992), i.e. transclusion. siastic fellows of free culture (Stallman, 2001). the current 2.2 The Representation of Context version In the structure of Novelle we are trying to retain the document authorship and the core concept of document his- history timeline tory of wikis through a typology of links, taking what we consider the best of the two worlds of transclusion blogs and wikis. a freezed quotation In Novelle each user owns his own lexias, and an other document history timeline the relations between them, i.e. links. Further- more authors are free to read and to link other users’ lexias. In other words, each user does per- Figure 3: How transclusion works mit everyone to link its own lexias for free, at the condition that the others do the same. Every user Rather than copy-and-paste contents from a may recall the link list on each element (e.g. a sin- lexia, a user may recall a quotation of the au- gle word) of his lexias at every time, but he can not thor’s lexia and write a comment in the surround- destroy them. Lexias may be commented by every ings. In doing so, the link list of the author’s user, but the author may retain for himself the right lexia will be updated with a special citation link to edit.