Dr. Dirk Roorda
Age: 50
Interview: 10.7.2012
Profile
Dirk Roorda studied mathematics and computer science and got his PhD in mathematical logic. Currently he is a researcher at Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), and institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and NWO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. He has got ample experience with text processing, programming and markup languages such as SGML, XML, HTML. An important goal in his work is contributing to long-term durability and preservation of of digital information.
His current research is in the field of the humanities, particularly the use of annotations in the study of literary corpora, such as the bible and 17th century scholarly correspondences. He considers himself as a mediator between data stored in archives and data made available for active research.
View on enhanced publications
Dirk Roorda makes a distinction between scholarly publications as a contribution to the body of knowledge in a certain domain on the one hand, and research products on the other hand. The printed publication and its digital counterpart in form of a PDF are very suitable for the first category. They can be easily preserved and made accessible over a long period of time. Most useful in his opinion are all those features that enhance the usability of the article, that make parts of the publication more easily accessible and understandable, for example a hyperlinked table of contents, facilities to highlight classes of terms and concepts in the text.
He considers interactive and multimedia products as belonging to the sphere of active research practice. The addition of multimedia makes a text more a tutorial than a scholarly communication in a proper sense of the word. If there should be any dynamics, HTML5 is the preferred language for implementation. These are best made accessible through a special website or wiki. In the publication both worlds can be connected, for example by links in a sidebar.
Top three
With regard to features of enhanced publications, he is particulalry interested in:
1. Navigations aids, such as a linked table of contents, highlighting of concepts and terms.
2. Outlining like a list of summary points.
3. Annotation an blogs attached to the publication.
Audio fragments