The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory brings together researchers working with online technologies to investigate writing and related cultural practices relevant to Canada and to the digital turn.
Words move. They move us to understand Canada’s tradition and diversity. They move 308,139 majors (as of 2015, Statistics Canada), including future leaders in politics, business, education, and culture, yearly through humanities programs of Canadian universities. They move $3.3 billion yearly through our publishing industry. They move people halfway around the world to visit Anne of Green Gables’ farmhouse on PEI.
Words move differently now, through semi-conductors, across screens, at lightning speed, and in vast quantities. Scholars have studied how words make and move us for centuries, but the digital turn demands new tools and new tool environments.
The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC, pronounced "quirk") / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada (CSÉC) is an online infrastructure for literary research in and about Canada designed to meet the challenges and embrace the opportunities of the digital turn.
What is CWRC?
CWRC’s key is integration: of system components; of content whose value increases exponentially when combined and subjected to new modes of inquiry; of scholarly materials with the massive archive of digital texts; of scholars themselves.
Content
An online repository. The repository or database houses born-digital scholarly materials, digitized texts, images, audio files, video, prosopographic records, and metadata (indices, annotations, cross-references).
Open access content. CWRC content is made freely available wherever possible. Although it contains some copyright materials, and some materials that are restricted for reasons to do with rights or work in progress, most CWRC content is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC license for sharing and reuse, although other licenses are possible as is the application of Traditional Knowledge Labels for Indigenous Content.
Interoperable content. Materials are stored in standard, preservation-friendly and interchange-friendly formats.
Existing content. CWRC is seeded with a substantial body of existing materials. The Early Canadian Cultural Journals Index, published on CD-ROM, is now available again through CRWC. The Canadian Early Women Writers significantly updates and expands the work originally published as Canada’s Early Women Writers, positioning it for ongoing enhancement by the community. The Orlando Project will have CWRC as its new home and share its Canadian content.
Content in progress. CWRC supports the production of born-digital content, from inception to dissemination, enabling scholars to explore the possibilities of collaboration at every stage of the research process. Individuals and teams have the option to develop their work in the open, to engage citizen scholars, within the walled garden of the Collaboratory in conversation with their peers, or to develop it behind the scenes and release their work in stages or as a whole once it is complete.
Dynamic content. The results of digital scholarship need not repose. Rather, they can be updated, enhanced, revised, remixed, and redistributed as part of an ongoing process of knowledge production. CWRC provides the means for scholarly communities to support the knowledge and resources that matter to them.
Tools
CWRC supports the creation, development, management, use, revision, enhancement, and publication of scholarly content through an extensive suite of tools that are accessible through the main CWRC interface.
Standards-oriented content creation. The uploading of existing materials, and creation of metadata, text, and other content is designed to promote adherence to best practices for interoperability and preservation. The centerpiece of this strategy is the CWRC-Writer browser-based editor that allows the creation of structured text, linked metadata, and interoperable annotations.
Content management. CWRC helps scholars keep track of the research process by allowing them to apply workflow stamps to record what has been done to materials, assign them to others, and draw on reports of sets of materials. This information is visualized in the forthcoming Credit Visualization (CV) tool that shows the contributions to individual items or collections of materials.
Content publication. Content can be published at any stage. Alternatively, CWRC can also be used as a production environment and content published elsewhere, or within a separate interface that draws on the repository.
Open source tools. CWRC builds on the open-source Islandora framework for a Fedora Commons repository. All code developed by the project is open-source in the project’s Github repository.
Programmatic access and extensibility. CWRC is built on a RESTful service-oriented architecture with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The modular interface supports the addition of new components.
Customizable interfaces. CWRC’s architecture allows projects to have their own customizable homepages as first points of access to their collections. It also allows projects to build and maintain their own Drupal multisite interfaces that draw on materials in the Collaboratory but provide specialized theming or functionality.
Why CWRC?
The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada is an online platform designed to enable unprecedented avenues for studying the words that most move people in and about Canada.
At this critical juncture when Canada’s literary heritage is moving online, management of information about Canadian cultural history still relies on tools derived from print models, which cannot accommodate the explosion of online materials. Some scholars work solo on small groups of texts while others engage in cross-disciplinary collaborative initiatives involving large numbers of texts, but all use digital tools and all create digital materials or data.
That cultural research material or data most often remains locked into hard drives, emerging in very partial form in the printed publications that report the scholarly findings, and inaccessible for reuse. If it appears online it is usually housed in siloed and scattered websites that do not allow data to be accessed in its raw form, combined with other data, repurposed by other researchers. Inaccessible to other scholars in the short term, and often as frozen as if it had been printed on a page, such data stands to be lost entirely in the long term, creating what has been called a second “dark age”.
CWRC works to remedy these problems.
It aims to connect data by promoting and providing means to employ standards and best practices that make data shareable, interoperable, and preservable. It provides a linked data foundation for investigating links between writers, texts, places, groups, and events. It provides Canadians scholar and scholars of Canada with a foundation for investigating past and present cultural change and a means of exploring new forms of knowledge production. It understands scholarship as the dynamic production of knowledge communities who can collaborate through digital means to sustain, enhance, and continually expand cultural knowledge.
Who is CWRC for?
CWRC aims to make digital research methods broadly accessible, and to develop an active community of researchers engaged in exploring the potential of collaboration online.
The general public and citizen scholars can access most of CWRC content and use many of its tools. Annotation of content is available in some contexts. Opportunities for contributing to and participating in CWRC are in the pipeline.
CWRC members are assigned their own private research spaces in which to explore the possibilities of researching online, and have access to the shared materials of the CWRC Commons.
CWRC projects are groups of researchers who are collaborating on shared sets of materials.
The development of CWRC involved more than 100 researchers and collaborators from a range of disciplines.
More information on types of membership can be found in the Terms and Conditions.