Digital documents

Autumn 2005

 Course responsible: Associate Professor Nils Pharo

Goal

The students should acquire theories and methods for production, analysis, organization, and use of digital documents. The three main foci are:

• Production and organization of documents
• Document typology and digital documents in a text analytical perspective
• Information retrieval and seeking in digital documents

Content 

Formats for Web documents (HTML, SGML og XML) including stylesheet formats (CSS og XSL). Semantic Web, hypertext, and information retrieval. Information architecture. Analysis and evaluation of digital documents, Web genre.

Format of the course

Lectures and colloquium. Smaller tasks and a larger theme paper, the theme paper is obligatory for the master students. All lectures will be in English.

We use Classfronter to distribute presentations and administrate discussion fora. To learn more about how to use Classfronter you should take a look at the introductory course, in Norwegian or in English.

• Course schedule

Assessment

6-hour written exam. Students aiming for a Master's degree must write a theme paper in addition to the exam. The theme paper counts 40%, the 6-hour exam 60%.

Required reading

Hand-outs and presentations are required reading

• Berners-Lee, T, Hendler, J & Lassila, O (2001). The semantic Web. Scientific American, 284 (5), 34?43. Available: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21 [June 18, 2003].
• Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. Atlantic Monthly, July. Available: http://www.w3.org/History/1945/vbush/ [August 18, 2004].
• Jansen, B.J. & Pooch, U. (2001). A review of Web searching studies and a framework for future research. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 52 (3), 235-246
• Lawrence, S & Giles, C.L. Accessibility of Information on the Web. Nature, 400(6740):107-109, 1999.
• Lie, H.W & Saarela, J. (1999). Multipurpose Web publishing using HTML, XML, and CSS. Communications of the ACM, 42 (10), 95-101.
• Lynch, C. (2001). The battle to define the future of the book in the digital world [online]. First Monday, 6 (10). Available: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue6_6/lynch/index.html [June 12, 2002].
• Pharo, N. (2002). The SST method schema: a tool for analysing Web information search processes, Chapters 4 and 5. Tampere: University of Tampere. (ISBN: 951-44-5354- 9)Also available: http://acta.uta.fi/pdf/951-44-5355-7.pdf.
• Ray, E. T. (2003). Learning XML. 2nd ed. Cambridge : O'Reilly. (ISBN: 0-596-00420-6).
• Rosenfeld, L. & Morville, P (2002). Information architecture for the World Wide Web. 2nd ed. Cambridge : O'Reilly. (ISBN: 0-596-00035-9).
• Shepherd, M. & Watters, C. (1998). The evolution of cybergenres. In: Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS '98). Hawaii, vol. II, p. 97-109.

Reference literature

• Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 (1998) [online]. Available: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/ [September 1, 2003]
• Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Second Edition) (2000) [online]. Available: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml [June 18, 2003].
• Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification (1999) [online]. Available: http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222/ [June 25, 2003].
• XML Information Set (2001) [online]. Available: http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset/ [June 25, 2003].
• XML Path Language (XPath): version 1.0 (1999) [online]. Available: http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath [June 18, 2003].
• XML Schema Part 0: Primer (2001) [online]. Available: http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-0/ [September 1, 2003]
• XSL Transformations (XSLT): version 1.0 (1999) [online]. Available: http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt [June 18, 2003].