Deeply Literate Document Interactions
We have only achieved a fraction of the potential of digital documents in a connected world. We believe that digital documents and the infrastructure around them should enable the intellectual labour and curiosity of the reader to dig deeper – to make inferences – to discover connections and make links. (Please refer to ‘Connections & Links’ if you have not already done so)
Deep literacy requires a combination of tools, information and skills. Academic authoring and reading is one of the most advanced forms of tools and skills available today, but is only scratching the surface of what is now theoretically possible.
The goal of developing tools and systems for deeper literacies is to support primarily scholars and researchers to write higher quality academic documents efficiently and to enhance access and deep reading of documents produced by others by others in order to simplify the extraction and manipulation of needed information.
In our view, a high-quality academic paper will present significant insights or findings in a manner in which the author’s conclusions are supported by well reasoned evidence and logical arguments.
Importantly too, in a well put together academic paper, authors must include all necessary citations to previous work. Therefore, for academic document discourse to progress it becomes vital to look at what purpose the discourse should serve, and from that design techniques and technology to support it.
Because richly interactive documents are far more useful than simple word processed documents, simply creating systems that project facsimiles of the analogue onto the digital are inadequate. Rather, a rich computational environment must be developed with tools to support a variety of Deep Literacy requirements to increase understanding of both original and existing research, writing and editing using new types of visualisations and interactions.
The Deeply Literate Workflow
The Deeply Literate Document
An ideal academic document, which is a good model for building ever deeper literacies around, allows for, and supports the following:
Authored by Frode Hegland and Livia Polanyi
(deep literacy for this site is being discussed on this blog: http://wordpress.liquid.info/category/deep-literacy/)