Friday 15 July 2011

Rich Internet Publications: “Show What You Tell”

an article by Leen Breure and Hans Voorbij (Utrecht University, Netherlands) and Maarten Hoogerwerf (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) published in Journal of Digital Information (Volume 12 Number 1 (2011))

Abstract (first paragraph only)

The journal article is still the basis of scholarly communication. This genre, however, largely adheres to the rules of the printed publication and does not meet the requirements of this age of digital Web publishing. Today we do not need to restrict ourselves any longer to communicating the results of the research process only. We can also allow readers to inspect the underlying data online, to publish their own comments and, using a variety of multimedia content, to be witness to intermediary stages of the scientific discovery process. This development has stimulated the transformation of the conventional article: when published in a digital format, it is more and more enhanced with data sets, photos, videos, interactive maps and animations; these enhancements affect its structure and layout. A variety of new publication formats is appearing, some of which can be no longer adequately described as simply “enhanced” publications. They are rather to be conceived as a new genre, for which we propose the term Rich Internet Publication (RIP), analogue to the well-known concept of Rich Internet Application. Both share features of information integration, visualization and exploration (i.e. non-linear reading), typical for hypermedia products.

The full article is available (HTML) at http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/1606/1738 and is well worth reading (and great fun at the same time)


No comments: