Spring 2019 · Columbia University
In 2019, I worked regularly with the Making and Knowing Project for more than four months through Columbia’s interdisciplinary course Transforming Texts: Textual Analysis, Literary Modeling, and Visualization and its associated lab, manuscript, and working-group activity. The work brought humanities and computer-science approaches together around the sixteenth-century French manuscript BnF Ms. Fr. 640 and the Project’s developing digital critical edition. I remained an occasional contributor and participant after that intensive spring period.
One capstone within that broader engagement was the final Epistemic Design project, created with Sandra Goldstein Lehnert and Gregory Houser: “Material Qualities of the Page: A New Interface for the Digital Critical Edition.” The Making and Knowing Project’s public student-project archive lists the work among the Spring 2019 student projects. The project materials document a proposed interface prototype and design research rather than a deployed feature in the final edition.
At a glance
- Artifact: collaborative interface proposal for a scholarly digital critical edition.
- Design problem: help readers move among transcription, translation, manuscript images, annotations, and material evidence without flattening the source into a single text layer.
- Methods: textual research, information architecture, user-centered interface thinking, interdisciplinary collaboration, and digital-humanities design.
From digitization to interface design
A digital edition has a different design problem from a scanned book or a conventional webpage. The interface has to help readers move among transcription, translation, images, annotations, material features, and scholarly interpretation without flattening the manuscript into a single stream of text.
Our work examined how the interface itself could make the material qualities of the manuscript more legible. That required thinking across textual scholarship, information architecture, interaction design, and the research habits of different kinds of readers.
An early example of my cross-disciplinary work
This project predates much of my later work in learning systems and analytics, but the underlying method is recognizable: identify what users need to understand, map the information and relationships behind that need, and design a structure that makes complexity navigable without hiding it.
It is also an example of the kind of collaboration I value most—work where disciplinary boundaries are useful inputs rather than limits. Historical research, close reading, interface design, computational methods, and user experience all became part of the same problem.
Project record and portfolio case study
The official Making and Knowing teaching site documents the course and names our project. The portfolio case study focuses on the research and design decisions behind the proposed interface.
View the Making and Knowing student-project archive
View the portfolio case study · Use the Digital Text & Epistemic Design Canvas · Explore the full portfolio