1.
REIMAGINING
THE DIGITAL
MONOGRAPH
@rdsnyderjr
Ron Snyder, JSTOR Labs
DPLAfest 2017
April 21, 2017
@abhumphreys
Alex Humphreys, JSTOR Labs

2.
ITHAKA is a not-for-profit organization that helps the academic
community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record
and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit
digital library of academic
journals, books, and
primary sources.
Ithaka S+R is a not-for-profit
research and consulting
service that helps academic,
cultural, and publishing
communities thrive in the
digital environment.
Portico is a not-for-profit
preservation service for
digital publications, including
electronic journals, books,
and historical collections.
Artstor provides 2+ million
high-quality images and
digital asset management
software to enhance
scholarship and teaching.

3.
JSTOR Labs works with partner publishers, libraries and
labs to create tools for researchers, teachers and students
that are immediately useful – and a little bit magical.

4.
labs.jstor.org/monograph
REIMAGINING THE MONOGRAPH

5.
HOW WE DID IT

6.
WORKING
RAPIDLY
Can we improve the
experience and value of
long-form scholarship?
Aug-Sep: User Research
Oct: Workshop
Nov: Build Prototype
Dec: Release Paper/Prototype

7.
TALKING TO USERS

8.
WORKING WITH THE COMMUNITY

9.
ITERATING, ITERATING, ITERATING, ITERATING, ITERA

10.
TOPICGRAPH

11.
labs.jstor.org/topicgraph
TOPICGRAPH
Understand at a glance the topics covered in a book.
Jump straight to pages about topics you’re researching.

12.
WHY THESE TOPICS?
AND, WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?
The topics used by Topicgraph are based on a controlled vocabulary
containing +40,000 terms.
These terms represent concepts (no entities, currently) found in the JSTOR
corpus.
The controlled vocabulary (JSTOR Thesaurus) was constructed from 20
thesauri obtained from various sources, including ERIC, MeSH, and NASA
• The thesaurus was developed in collaboration with Access Innovations
(creator of the Data Harmony tools) and subject matter experts
• Key branches in the thesaurus are reviewed and corrected by subject
matter experts

13.
JSTOR THESAURUS

14.
WHY THESE TOPICS?
AND, WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?
Human curated tagging rules have been developed for each concept in the
JSTOR Thesaurus enabling concepts to be extracted from unstructured
text
All documents in the JSTOR corpus have been tagged with thesaurus
concepts using a rules-based indexer
This tagged corpus is then used to select training documents for building
an LDA topic model
The LDA topic model enables us to identify latent topics found in text in
addition to those explicitly identified with the human-generated rules

15.
THESAURUS TAGGER
RULE BUILDER

16.
TOPIC MODEL
• Labeled LDA Topic model
• Model trained using documents
selected from JSTOR corpus
with tagged thesaurus concepts
• Using OSS Mallet tool
• Current version of model
includes approximately 11,000
topics
• Each topic represents a
distribution of word probabilities
redistricting district congressional minority political majority house legislative racial
gerrymandering court republican plan electoral districting seat representative black voter
democrat partisan election democratic representation line supreme legislature drawn control
population voting drawing policy texas draw map claim boundary following commission outcome
shaw race census legal principle creation decision create finding elect lublin polarization optimal
elected composition affect member measure vote gain previous legislator geographic southern
section every approach controlled round note gerrymander reapportionment compactness
decennial bipartisan constitutional find substantive california roll competitive county competition
party requirement federal north post redrawn incumbent criterion consequence likely formal safe
delegation georgia justice influence shotts equal favor might scholar equality south power law
judicial bias king carolina call according voss baker panel professor rule mandate creating
increased determine constraint politics argue standard redis grofman reno cain redrawing margin
share ing tricting decrease congress geographical requires simple held critic empirical david
niemi perverse latino analyze examine debate rather impact next provides give balance affected
subsequent possible take practice community robbins constitution computer evenly fraction
constituent illinois supporter shape responsiveness typically various proposed despite either
focus conclusion african opportunity redistrict mcdonald white numerous test statewide percent
suggests thus choice largely develop decade conclude fact four reached
Redistricting
district congressional congress house representative member federal districting seat majority
plan representation population congressman apportionment elected court president washington
columbia legislative census party interest political gerrymandering redistricting home thomas
affect every black democrat dis foley carolina find reapportionment constituency supreme
constitution voting geographic active dinner responsiveness south force john gingrich legislature
equal membership neighborhood testimony north james service decennial constituent passed
boundary law creation firm charles spending congruent election politically addition april contact
proportion con assistant position following york land unconstitutional resident miller voter pledge
stephen city official minority respective mainland kentucky post clause better divisor perimeter
yao secretary republican senate moderate congruence map county grant senior drawing portion
speaker feature decision professor became gerrymander swain trict leapfrog federalist partisan
senator vote captain compelling lucas candidate race create harm require fourth shape you
traditional purpose shaped concern people shaw historical simply policy henry david allocation
vetoed arkansas smiley serra carl volunteer politician budget burden electoral leaf education
reduced principle proximity november significant just represented second gathered fiorina
representa gressional glazer apportion gerrymandered boris bronx issn rank redrawing twice
refused eliminates provincial jefferson returned witness campaign fletcher georgia empirically
personnel size maximize half reserve read demographic percent contrary required determining
throughout …
Congressional districts
Top words from some sample topics

17.
TEXT SEGMENTATION
• Document text is recursively
split into roughly equal sized
chunks until a max size
threshold is reached
• Chunks aligned on chapter
and page boundaries
• Topic inference is then
performed on all text
chunks at all levels
In Partisan Gerrymandering and the Construction of American Democracy, Erik J. Engstrom offers …
In Partisan Gerrymandering and the Construction … Electoral Competition and Critical Elections 121 …

18.
TOPIC PROFILES
• Using the topic inferencer,
topic profiles are generated
for each chunk identifying
the top topics and weights
• The top N topics from
these leaf chunks are then
used in the generation of
the topic graph
visualizations
In Partisan Gerrymandering and the Construction of American Democracy, Erik J. Engstrom offers …
In Partisan Gerrymandering and the Construction … Electoral Competition and Critical Elections 121 …
Redistricting -153
Gerrymandering - 113
Delegation of authority - 65
Congressional voting - 45
Democracy - 13
Gerrymandering - 66
Democracy - 47
Politicians - 1
Redistricting - 128
Gerrymandering - 38
Malapportionment - 28
Electoral districts - 4
Redistricting - 241
Gerrymandering - 6
Minority voters - 1
Redistricting - 131
Minority voters - 46
Congressional districts - 4

19.
TOPIC VISUALIZATIONS
Various topic visualization
approaches were considered
for the topic profiles
• Including heat maps, tree
maps, streamgraphs, simple
line and area charts
• Based on user testing we
selected an approach that
used multiple D3 area
charts
An early D3 Streamgraph prototype

20.
TOPIC VISUALIZATIONS
Various topic visualization
approaches were considered
for the topic profiles
• Including heat maps, tree
maps, streamgraphs, simple
line and area charts
• Based on user testing we
selected an approach that
used multiple D3 area
charts

21.
WHAT’S NEXT?
• Topicgraph webapp code is
available for forking and
customization
• https://github.com/JSTOR-Labs/topicgraph
• Elements of Topicgraph have
been incorporated into the
new-ish JSTOR Labs Text
Analyzer tool
• Directions and further work
on the Topicgraph POC tool
will in large part be
determined by the community
JSTOR Labs Text Analyzer
App – https://www.jstor.org/analyze
Video – https://youtu.be/JTO859YCxDI

22.
THE
REIMAGINED MONOGRAPH

23.
WHITE PAPER
Currently released
as a draft for comment
Describes the
project, process & prototype
Includes 12 principles to
consider when reimagining the
monograph
labs.jstor.org/monograph

24.
1. The importance of great writing is a given.
2. The ideal digital monograph should allow different kinds of readers to
navigate it in different ways.
3. Readers should be given better tools to assess the content of scholarly books
quickly and efficiently.
4. Readers should be able to navigate more quickly to the portion of the book
they are interested in.
5. Readers should be given better capabilities for situating a book within the
larger scholarly conversation.
6. Readers should be able to ‘flip’ between sections of a digital monograph as
easily as they can in a print book.
7. In an ideal world, readers would be able to work simultaneously with both a
print and digital edition.
8. Books should be able to ‘travel’ easily from device to device.
9. Readers should be able to interact with and mark up digital books.
10. Readers should be able to interact with books in collaborative environments.
11. Ideally, digital book collections and aggregations would offer serendipitous
discovery—the “library stacks” effect.
12. Digital scholarly book files should be open and flexible.
TWELVE PRINCIPLES

25.
1. The importance of great writing is a given.
2. The ideal digital monograph should allow different kinds of readers to
navigate it in different ways.
3. Readers should be given better tools to assess the content of scholarly books
quickly and efficiently.
4. Readers should be able to navigate more quickly to the portion of the book
they are interested in.
5. Readers should be given better capabilities for situating a book within the
larger scholarly conversation.
6. Readers should be able to ‘flip’ between sections of a digital monograph as
easily as they can in a print book.
7. In an ideal world, readers would be able to work simultaneously with both a
print and digital edition.
8. Books should be able to ‘travel’ easily from device to device.
9. Readers should be able to interact with and mark up digital books.
10. Readers should be able to interact with books in collaborative environments.
11. Ideally, digital book collections and aggregations would offer serendipitous
discovery—the “library stacks” effect.
12. Digital scholarly book files should be open and flexible.
TWELVE PRINCIPLES

26.
1. The importance of great writing is a given.
2. The ideal digital monograph should allow different kinds of readers to
navigate it in different ways.
3. Readers should be given better tools to assess the content of scholarly books
quickly and efficiently.
4. Readers should be able to navigate more quickly to the portion of the book
they are interested in.
5. Readers should be given better capabilities for situating a book within the
larger scholarly conversation.
6. Readers should be able to ‘flip’ between sections of a digital monograph as
easily as they can in a print book.
7. In an ideal world, readers would be able to work simultaneously with both a
print and digital edition.
8. Books should be able to ‘travel’ easily from device to device.
9. Readers should be able to interact with and mark up digital books.
10. Readers should be able to interact with books in collaborative environments.
11. Ideally, digital book collections and aggregations would offer serendipitous
discovery—the “library stacks” effect.
12. Digital scholarly book files should be open and flexible.
TWELVE PRINCIPLES

27.
1. The importance of great writing is a given.
2. The ideal digital monograph should allow different kinds of readers to
navigate it in different ways.
3. Readers should be given better tools to assess the content of scholarly books
quickly and efficiently.
4. Readers should be able to navigate more quickly to the portion of the book
they are interested in.
5. Readers should be given better capabilities for situating a book within the
larger scholarly conversation.
6. Readers should be able to ‘flip’ between sections of a digital monograph as
easily as they can in a print book.
7. In an ideal world, readers would be able to work simultaneously with both a
print and digital edition.
8. Books should be able to ‘travel’ easily from device to device.
9. Readers should be able to interact with and mark up digital books.
10. Readers should be able to interact with books in collaborative environments.
11. Ideally, digital book collections and aggregations would offer serendipitous
discovery—the “library stacks” effect.
12. Digital scholarly book files should be open and flexible.
TWELVE PRINCIPLES

28.
“The reimagined monograph –
whatever that ultimately means – will
not be built in a single step, or by a
single organization.”

29.
WHAT SHOULD
THE NEXT STEP BE?

30.
DEMOCRACY
IN
ACTION!
Vote here:
PollEv.com/jstorlabs

31.
THE
“BOOK
AS
GATEWAY”

32.
THE
“BOOK
DASHBOARD”

33.
THE “SCHOLARLY READER”

34.
THE
“CITATION
MIXER”

35.
Thank you
Alex Humphreys
@abhumphreys
alex.humphreys@ithaka.org
Ron Snyder
@rdsnyderjr
ronald.snyder@ithaka.org
http://labs.jstor.org

36.
APPENDIX
(OPEN IN CASE OF NO
INTERNET CONNECTION)