Alph
the digital book
Using a book metaphor enables Alph to maintain a "what you see is what I see" strategy. The visual stability and our general familiarity with how to do things with books help connect the online reading environment to our physical one. In online collaborative work, it is often important that participants share a stable and mutually understood view of the work. Anchoring the online reading environment in a book metaphor helps achieve those goals.
the annotations
Many online resources support conversations: instant messaging, email, wikis, and of course all of the proprietary social networking applications like Facebook. Each resource provides a different set of advantages for participants. Some feature speed; others focus on persistence over time. In developing Alph, we wanted to create supports for conversation that would persist over time and that would create both the space and the time for reflective posting. We developed the annotation strategy to be asynchronous, deliberate, and enduring.
An annotation strategy exploits the structure of the underlying, shared resource -- in this case a book -- to organize and constrain the conversations that arise from its shared use. The design of the tool requires placement of each note in some particular place on a virtual page, encouraging reader/writers to be mindful of the relationship between their writing and the text they are reading. Moreover, the author of each note must actively choose to share the note, reminding reader/writers of the social context for the text they are creating. Unlike email, threaded discussion lists, chat utilities and the like, an annotation tool keeps the conversation anchored in and focused on the shared text -- the book every member of the group is reading together.
the social text
The social text consists of a series of conversations between individual readers and the book they are reading and among all the readers in a given group. This newly visible social context for reading is what makes Alph different from other digital book readersing environments. The Activity Hubs enable members of a group to navigate to the most recently annotated pages or to the pages with the densest collection of notes quickly and easily. The hubs, then, support readers' engagement with each other even while the design of the whole tool helps focus the social engagement on the shared experience of the work the group is reading. We think of this way of experiencing a work as "reading alone together" because each reader is free to manage her relations with both texts -- the unfolding story and the flowering social network -- in her own way and at her own pace. She can defer reading others' reactions until she has finished a section or chapter, or she can move back and forth between the book's text and the social text as she encounters the notes left by others.