what is the future of text online?
this is an interesting post that i picked up on from the ALPSP alert... some good points worthy of consideration.
the ALPSP take on it is...
'Scholarly writing traditionally conforms to certain journalistic principles – which Nielsen has promoted as the ‘inverted pyramid’ – use of abstracts/summaries for long content, subheadings – so far so good – as well as the use of short paragraphs, bulleted lists and hypertext. Despite the availability of faster internet connections, enabling ‘rich’ media (used increasingly as supplementary materials in scholarly and professional publishing) can become ‘poor’ media because such audio or visual materials are linear and difficult to search. Publishers need to be as concerned about readability on the screen as they are about readability on the page – line lengths, breaking up solid text and the like. Many scholarly and professional publishers use the same format for the screen as for the print, a practice which hopefully will not last for long.'
this is certainly a good area for debate - and what eventually does make for good science writing? i'd suppose that what we have to address as publishers is what content is most important to the reader and when (i.e. what needs to be seen first and fast), what needs to be updatable (reference lists, links, author contact info?, etc.), and how we manage the process of getting this data online and archived consistently and in a reusable form.
i like the NLM XML standard - i think it's a godsend. there is enough freedom with XML (pretty much infinite if i 'get' the concept behind XML) plus there are enough elements and attributes to cover our needs as 'capturers' of valuable information. and i think that here's where an interesting branch-off appears. maybe our role is not to push and push on how we present this information - we're doing a pretty good job of that already - or the speed at which we publish - we're doing ok there too - but how we really add value... and i think that is going to be either hosting the data too (as 'electronic supplementary material', as we do now (rudimentarily), or finding an efficient/workable way to link to data repositories (however they will take form).
looks like i've shifted my perspective as i've written here. but i suppose i think that our authors (mine anyway) are already doing a pretty good job of breaking up their written content into usable, web-useful chunks. it's how we make their information 'dance' that i think requires further focus...
