Development and adaptation of the NewRadial web application to arbitrary data sources
LE3 .A278 2012
2012
Benoit, Darcy Giles, Rick Saklofske, Jon
Acadia University
Bachelor of Computer Science
Honours
Computer Science
NewRadial is a new kind of data visualization for conducting humanities research. Software for examining and annotating literature often imposes, quite naturally for most written work, an implicit structure of linearity inherited from the front-to-back nature of printed books, resulting in interface designs involving ordered lists of pages, and searchable text encodings of the literary content of the work. This single vision of what de nes a book causes trouble when applied to di erently structured literature such as that of William Blake, who himself struggled with the constraints of the printed page. The NewRadial web application o ers an alternative environment for working with literary texts that is not limited by the paradigm of the printed book, consisting of a persistent workspace for online scholarship in terms of groups and connections between icon-based media. In fact, the issue of di erently structured works of literature goes beyond concerns of visualization, in that di erently structured media are often represented digitally using di ering formats and standards. In order to make use of the many data sources available online now and in the future, NewRadial must interface with web services that expose programming interfaces as widely varied as the services themselves. To facilitate this, NewRadial includes an extendable system of pluggable adapters written in JavaScript to convert data from remote services to a usable format. In addition, NewRadial makes its content available to other applications in the form of RDF- encoded representations of its groups, connections, comments and users, available through an HTTP API.
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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:950