The LogiLogi Foundation

LogiLogi, and it’s Quest for Critical Mass will be presented (as a poster) at the Digital Humanities 2010 conference in London, this June. First of all we will analyze the concept of critical mass, as it applies to collaborative (hypertext Digital Humanities) web-applications, and at all the factors that come into it, such as network-effects, and bifurcation points.

Surprisingly little has been written about these issues so far, except for Philip Ball’s Critical Mass, and Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping point, and those even deal only indirectly with the topic. Academic articles are (so far) nonexistant (except for some on broader issues in sociology and economics), and what little there is, is to be found on the web.

Then at the DH conference, we will present the results of the informal usability study that I will be doing in about two weeks, at the ISVW, in the Netherlands. We will implement some of the suggested improvements, and report on those. Following that, we hopefully will be able to show something of the process of gaining critical mass on LogiLogi. Our abstract is on-line here.

Today I’ve also given a presentation about it at King’s College London, as it’s also my thesis project. You can find that presentation here. In addition I will be presenting LogiLogi in general, at the London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship, on the 11th of March. Be there, if you happen to be in the neighbourhood.

I just came back from the ‘second snow workshop’ of the LiquidPub project in Ovronnaz, Switzerland. Besides the location (first time at a winter-sports resort for me), the topic of the workshop was fascinating. It gave me a better understanding of the LiquidPub project, and while I had read most of the papers on LiquidPub before arriving, nothing can replace some face to face interaction with those in the project. There was a good, and vibrant atmosphere.

The mountains near Ovronnaz

The slides of my presentation on LogiLogi, and how it is minimalistic (and minimalism is good), are on-line here. The presentation went well, and most people I spoke to were quite positive about LogiLogi.

While waiting at the airport on the way back, I wrote up some of my thoughts and questions about LiquidPub. Such as: whether people really want to continue updating articles, what motivates people who work on large academic software projects, why such projects tend to come up with overly complicated things and how academic software-projects are, or should be funded.

During the workshop I also thought a lot about possible weaknesses of LogiLogi (it not having many users so far, being the most pressing problem), and about how this could be improved. Making things easier and simpler seems key. One improvement towards this, which I implemented right away, is that titles and tags now only need to be specified after a text (logi) has been written. This should make it easier to simply begin writing, and worry about a title or tags once the logi is typed up.

At the airport I also wrote down some of these thoughts: whether there are people who are willing to share ideas in anything but journal-papers, problems with usability, and LogiLogis seeming similarity to a blogging platform.

LogiLogi is, as of today, ready for translation. We have worked on this because a German philosophy journal will start using LogiLogi some time within the next months. They asked us if they could have it translated. In addition it was something that was on our todo list for some time.

We use the I18n (Internationalization) framework provided by Rails, and the Translate Rails plugin for editing the translations. The Translate plugin provides a nice web-based user-interface for entering translations. It does, however, require one to install LogiLogi (and ruby) locally, and run it using Rails built-in webserver. You can run it with script/server from the trunk directory, and then point your browser to http://localhost:3000/do/translate to start a translation.

Besides this, I will also be presenting LogiLogi at the second LiquidPub workshop in Ovronnaz, Switzerland next week. LiquidPub is a project with similar aims as LogiLogi, though it is much more ambitious, in that, instead of trying to be an informal means of communication besides journals, it tries to change journals themselves (filtering articles for readers, building articles from smaller bits of text, and allowing articles/journals to be ever up to date). And not just that, it also tries to serve the organisation of conferences, and the writing and publication of books and educational materials.

LiquidPub is a project by the University of Trento, Springer Science, Institut Nicod and the University of Fribourg. It is backed among others, by: the International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and the International Conference on Software Engineering. Looking forward to being there, and learning more about it, as well as to their views on LogiLogi.

I’ve been studying Digital Humanities at King’s College London for about four months now, and I must say that it has been a good experience so far. The professors are nice and knowledgeable people, and the readings as part of classes are generally very interesting. In addition, to prepare for a Phd / MA in philosophy, I have also been taking a 40-credit (little over 20% of the yearly credits) course in Ethics at King’s philosophy department. A course that is fascinating and well-taught as well.

A question I often get, though, is: “What the (kleene star) is Digital Humanities?”. My usual response is that it is doing humanities research using IT-technology: Such as data-mining philosophical texts, modeling philosophical arguments, making 3D models of historical sites, or building tools and resources for philosophers (or other humanists). And that has appeared to be about right, though in practice there is a bit of a bias towards building digital editions of canonical texts, because that is what is best at attracting funding. But anyway, here is an alternative explanation of what Digital Humanities is to classical Humanities on Youtube (don’t fully agree with it, but is a funny watch anyway).

There is a rule at King’s, or more likely, in the British educational system, that one is not allowed to write an assessed essay on the same topic/resource twice. Therefore I haven’t been writing much about LogiLogi so far, as I want to save it for my thesis.

LogiLogi has a base in London now. I (Wybo) moved to London last month. I’m doing a MA in Digital Humanities at King’s College London now (with a HSP Talents Scholarship, and a KCL Int. Humanities Scholarship).

For my MA-thesis I am going to improve LogiLogi, and try to initiate a first community of philosophers on it. The proposal for this can be read here.

Also I finally received the last grade for my BAs (I hold 3 BA’s now), which is a 9.5 (out of ten, less than 3% get this mark) for my thesis for Philosophy on LogiLogi: Philosophy Beyond the Paper. You can read it on LogiLogi first of all, and here as a .pdf paper simulation.

London by night

I (Wybo) have just been at the LIRMM lab in Montpellier, France for a week, working on LogiLogi. The LIRMM lab, under the leadership of Michel Robert, and with the guidance of Jean Sallatin, will be using LogiLogi to write and discuss their self-evaluative documents, and their mission-statement. The LIRMM really is an inspiring place, where 180 staff and about 170 PhD & master’s students work on topics like robotics, micro- electronics, and (most of them) on computer-science.

I’m typing this as I am on the train back home, because we have been working so hard (also over the weekend) that there was hardly any time left for other things, such as updating the blog. I haven’t even seen the beach, except from the plane :-)

We have fixed a lot of bugs, and also done some small, but important improvements to the UI. In all, it was a good time, and for all the hard work (the devving was fun in itself too!), there were also good conversations, even if some of them were in French :-)

I will be doing some more fixes during a few evenings in the coming weeks, but LogiLogi should be quite usable and stable now. There is more good news in the making, but I will post it in another post.

From left to right: Martine, Claire (designer), and Wybo (action-shot :-)...

Reallife discussion later in the project

Just got back from the ECAP (European Conference on Computing and Philosophy) 2009 in Barcelona. Though it was quite a broad conference, and the quality of the presentations sometimes varied, I found it to be a fascinating and definitely recommendable event. Last year I also attended and presented at it, in Monpellier. A video of this is now available in ogg format, (and flv, slides of 2008 are here).

Drawn from the interesting talks of this year was first of all a keynote by Luciano Floridi on the relationship between information and knowledge. Then there was a talk by Kevin Warwick, on what it is like to be a robot (and he’s the guy that actually tried it out!). Then there was a talk by Philip Brey on the proper role of information in society. And there was more, notably also a track on Singularity.

Then there was “our” track on computer-supported cooperative work. Two presentations (apart from ours, naturally :) in it were especially relevant to LogiLogi. The first being the one by Dominique Luzeaux, on Wiki-Debate. Their logical relationships and emoticons for comments were especially nice (though a bit overly-complex for voluntary users imho). The second was the presentation by Luc Schneider. It especially went into the LiquidPub project, and the ideas behind it, which are strikingly similar to those behind LogiLogi. So we are not alone, and judging our company, likely on the right track.

Besides this, interest in cooperation was expressed by at least two parties. But more on this when things become more concrete. The slides of our presentation can be downloaded here

LogiLogi has a simple API for creating and exporting documents (logis) now. It is compatible with the Blogger API, though the authentication part is not yet. Logis are exported and and imported in Atom format. Go here for an example of a logi in this format.

Matching the API the LLRemote gem library was released for use in scripts that consume it. In addition an example script was created for exporting latex documents to LogiLogi. It is called LaTex LogiLogi Remote (t-llre.rb) and available here. I used it for uploading and updating my history thesis.

The Philosophers Rally – The Future of Philosophy was a vibrant, interesting, local conference. We had many interesting discussions, and there were good talks to attend, not just of the keynote speakers such as David Gamez, but also of Johnny Søraker, on virtual worlds, of Marleen Moors, on technology, certainty and death, and of David Koepsell, on copyrights in the nano-age.

And of course LogiLogi was also presented at the Rally (slides available here). We had an average audience, and received some good questions, especially by David Gamez on community building. Charl Linssen, an occasional developer of LogiLogi, and I also met again in person at the rally, and we had some good conversations, and a few beers together at the campus bar… In all it was a nice conference, and LogiLogi was received positively by those present.

(picture thanks to Charl)

I will be writing my Ba-thesis for history on LogiLogi. It is about the justifiability of Intellectual Property, given the historic and technological developments since the introduction of copyright- and patent-laws.

So yes, I will be eating my own dogfood :-) Not just the final version will be put on-line, but I will write it incrementally and in the open, as it develops. This even though the end-product will still have to be a pdf paper-simulation that can guise as a normal article and be printed and all (to jack into the university system).

With it, as one of the people behind LogiLogi, of course I hope to learn what works and what doesn’t in LogiLogi, and thus how LogiLogi might be improved, but also to have a valuable discussion on Intellectual Property, a subject that is very important to the future of philosophy and free deliberation, and for the kind of society that we and our children may hope to live in.

It has been rather silent for almost two months now, but we haven’t been idle, and there’s more good to come. I, Wybo, a core-developer and author of most writings on this blog, have been working hard in the last few months (and will for some months to come) to finish my Ba-degrees at the University of Groningen. This because as of September I will be doing the Digital Humanities MA at Kings College London.

Now Kings College London is not bad, as the Brits would say, but the coolest thing about it all is the subject matter of the MA (& also what makes it relevant for this blog), as Digital Humanities at Kings is just the thing to do and the place to go for improving LogiLogi, and for working on systems like it!

For example among others John Bradley, the creator of the desktop note tool Pliny, and Michele Pasin, one of the persons behind CoHere are working there. And then there’s Willard McCarty, one of the foremost thinkers on humanities computing, and many more people that I have not met yet, or only shortly, and whom I will, or hope to, meet there soon :)

The FOSDEM was pretty amazing. The Friday night Beer-event was overwhelming to say the least, and on saturday morning there was a very interesting keynote talk on the future of ‘Free and Open’ with many applications moving into the cloud by Mark Surman, of the Mozilla Foundation.

And there were many other good talks, of which for us quite a few were on sunday in the Ruby and Rails developer room.

I arrived there before 10 in the morning, after having had another interesting evening at the Gnome beer event (as for being dwarfish or involved in the Gnome project, I’m quite tall, and only a normal user of the windowmanager). But I had some good chats there, and of course good Belgian beer, especially the Früli strawberry beer.

...anyway, but back to Sunday. A particulary good talk was the one by Peter Vanbroekhoven on the object model of Rails.

We also gave our presentation on sunday, on LogiLogi, the importance of freedom on the Brave New Web, and on the three Rails plugins: Thorny Form, Magick Corners and Body Builder. The sheets can be downloaded here (as pdf, sources here).

Some further good news is that LogiLogi will be presented at the Philosophers Rally 2009 – The Future of Philosophy conference which is held in Enschede on the 12th and 13th of May. This is a conference by and for philosophers, so we are really looking forward to this presentation, and to discussing LogiLogi with them.

The third and last Rails plugin of the plugin triathlon before our presentation tomorrow at the FOSDEM conference is the Body Builder plugin.

This plugin fixes the problem of how to organize the parts of your app that are re-used like blocks across pages, like those in side-bars and top-bars. It allows you to create render-points where content can be inserted in views. In short it allows one to set body_parts (variables that can be yielded in views) from controllers. Also since Rails components are notoriously slow, this is a nice alternative.

After installing the plugin you can declare body parts in your controllers (most often only in controllers/application.rb) with: body_parts :top, :sidebar. Then you can fill them up in the same, or in inheriting controllers by passing method syms to body- name_body, just like Rails filters: top_body :navigation_bar. The return value of these methods will be added to the body.

Then in the view you can display the body with <= yield :sidebar_body %> resp. <= yield :top_body %>. As you can see Body Builder supports multiple, user-defined bodies. This contrary to the SimpleSidebar plugin. See the full Body Builder docs for code examples and installation instructions.

Our second Rails Plugin to be released is Magick Corners. It is for adding Scalable Vector Graphics as backgrounds to dom- elements without a hassle. It can scale and stretch them to size, and also generate them for simple cases like a div with rounded corners.

After installing the plugin you can apply rounded corners to any dom-object (only divs are officially supported) using css-selectors, like: mcorners = new MagickCorners(); mcorners. add(‘div.logi_body’). And also display any SVG image as the background of divs of any size with: mcorners.add(‘div.add_tag’, {‘scaled_image’ : ‘add_tag.svg’}). Images are scaled/folded to suit. See the full Magick Corners docs for a code example and detailed installation instructions.

Over three days we will be releasing Rails Plugins extracted from LogiLogi.org in a little Plugin Triathlon. And then on Sunday, the fourth day, we will present the three of them (at least two, three if time permits) in the Ruby and Rails room of the FOSDEM in Brussels. And the first one is released today. It is Thorny Form

Thorny Form is a Rails plugin for unobtrusively protecting forms against form-SPAM. It adds extra fields like a honeypot and some others which can then be checked before the form-data is used in your application. It is not an unbreakable solution, but it is likely to continue to work for quite some time. The following joke from Ned Batchelders blog nicely sketches why:

Jim and Joe are out hiking in the forest, when in the distance, they see a huge bear. The bear notices them, and begins angrily running toward them. Jim calmly checks the knots of his shoes and stretches his legs.

Joe asks incredulously, “What are you doing? Do you think you can outrun that bear!?”

Jim replies, “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.”

To use Thorny Form you just need to change two lines per form. First in the view form_for has to be replaced by thorny_form_for (remote_form_for by remote_thorny_form_for). Then in the controller you have to add a check for spam in the shape of self.thorny_form_free_of_spam?. See the full Thorny Form docs for a code example and installation instructions.