Digital Bibliography

So begins another day in my month-long wait for Sophie. Initially, a free, open-source software project from the Institute for the Future of the Book, the project is now being developed by The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the University of Southern California, the Macarthur Foundation, and Astea Solutions. The second version of the software is supposed to be available tomorrow. But it was also supposed to be available on Oct. 15. But deadlines are made to be pushed back, right? Especially by not-for-profit entities providing a potentially game-changing software tool for free? Well, if they push the deadline back another month, I’m fine with that. No hard feelings here. I just want to get a look at this new version.

So what is Sophie? It’s basically a software product designed for the production of digital documents that sort of bridge the gap between web pages and traditional print strategies. Like a traditional book, it will often have a cover, will included pages, pictures, and text, as well. But Sophie books can also include much more sophisticated (pun intended, others implied) technologies, like single-page timelines, multi-page timelines, video, audio, slide shows, dynamically populating text, static text, collaboration, external links, internal documents, etc. I’m not sure about how this version of the software with interface with pdfs, flash content, HTML, databases, etc. I’m also not sure which browsers will be able to view these books–whether or not a plug-in will be necessary, and if it will be available right away.

If you’re one of the lucky/unlucky souls who tried to use the intital version of the software, you’re probably aware of most of its limitations. Sometimes unstable (especially on Windows machines), sometimes counter-intuitive. Sometimes impossible to understand what’s going wrong, with little help available online. But the biggest roadblock to Sophie’s success was the lack of browser integration for viewing and/distribution. Basically, if you wanted to view someone else’s Sophie book, you had to download and install the Sophie Viewer, and then download (and often troubleshoot) the Sophie book itself. Some of the texts were certainly worth it, but it was never going to become even a popular technology until it was viewable via browser. So let’s hope they’ve got it ready to go tomorrow. I’m hoping to put together a little book of my own to give it a test drive early next week. I’ll be sure to post it if everything works out.

In the meantime, I’ve embedded two videos below. The first is the latest version of Sophie’s into video. The second video, which highlights some aspects that the first doesn’t is also embedded.

I’ve also included this second video, which highlights some aspects that the first doesn’t.

If you’re one of those who are also looking forward to this release, or if you’ve composed in Sophie before, or you’ve got any questions about it, I would love it if you would take a minute to contribute a comment below.

Fingers crossed…

I’m still trying to produce a text using the Sophie software that we’ll be teaching at DMAC next week. Ultimately, I’d like to produce a text using only digital media as my composing tools. Of course I realize that a word processors and blogs are highly digital tools. But what we’re going to be talking about (I think) at DMAC is how to use tools that have, as their primary purpose, modes of composition that work outside of alphabetic-privileging technologies. Or if not outside of them, then only using alphabetic text as one among many strategies.

So how might this work? Well, I’ve only got about 48 hours to complete this task. That means I’m going to have to develop a goal for the project, work through it as I produce my text, and then publish it to my blog or website. Here are the tools I have at my disposal: Sophie rich media editor (for combining and editing the various media in a single text); SnagIt screen capture software (to document some of the on-screen strategies I’ve employed during this process); Audacity audio software (to edit voiceovers and songs); Mindjet MindManager; Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium (to handle photo editing, web page design, graphics, and other various editing tasks that the other software might not be able to handle). I’m hoping to use as much as possible the free versions of all of this software, but I’m not familiar enough with Sophie to know what I can do with it, so I’m using the Adobe products only as second choices for certain tasks.

I’m going to use the following hardware: Dell Inspiron 1721 with an additional 19” external monitor; Canon Elura 100 video camera; Canon Powershot A610; Edirol R-09 audio recorder; a Labtec Stereo 242 headset; Sony MDR-NC11A noise canceling headphones.

I have two goals for this exercise. First, I want to start thinking about the ways that alternative digital composition tools (software and hardware) might enable or force changes to more traditional pen-and-ink or word processing strategies. In other words, I’m curious what it means to us video or audio recording devices tool for developing and shaping an idea? This question comes out of something I noticed in a class in multimodal composition at the University of Louisville last summer. My classmates and I more often than not used alphabetic literacy as the heart of our processes. Often people write down what they were going to say into the microphone or video recorder. People brainstormed on paper. When we reflected on what we were doing, many of us (even with all of this software and hardware available to us) still returned to the comfort of alphabetic text production. What I found most challenging about the class were those moments I challenged myself to forego the familiarity of alphabetic strategies and just jump right into the technology. Those moments were fascinating, indeed, but they were so challenging that I couldn’t sustain the exploration into anything more than a short, quickly edited piece involving one or two modes. So I’m hoping that this project is a bit more sustained, with more depth.

The second goal, as I’ve already stated above, is to learn the basics of the Sophie software. I’m almost totally unfamiliar with it at this point, but the few attempts I’ve made to begin have been frustrating. I couldn’t figure out which tool to use to open the tutorials, and I couldn’t get the sound to work when I did. Debra mentioned that the sound doesn’t actually work on the first tutorial, so I was probably doing it right to begin with. She also warned me that the program is really buggy. I’ll have to keep saving all the time. That’s one of the joys of a young open-source program, I guess.

I’ll be back soon. For now, it’s time to begin…