Yianni Yessios, Manager of Web Technology in the Instructional Technology Group [ITG], introduced Ynote, an application developed in-house at ITG. Ynote allows a group of researchers to share, manage and explore a shared pool of notes, thereby facilitating collaborative scholarship. It is also designed to allow instructors flexibility in organizing the database’s material to aid in classroom presentations and activities.
Yianni Yessios explained that Ynote is an application originally conceived of by Pericles Lewis, Professor of Comparative Literature and English, for his course on English Literary Modernism. Professor Lewis wanted to create a digital database with which Graduate students could engage together. Essentially, he wanted a tool for collective research.
For Professor Lewis, it was important that all the fruits of students’ research, archival or otherwise, (and not just the fruits of research that made it into their papers), be retained in a single repository that afforded a variety of ways to hierarchically stratify information. Since Professor Lewis turned to the sciences for models of collective research, the tool designed for his course in Modernism became known as “The Modernism Lab.”
Ken Panko, Manager of ITG, stated that as technologically advanced as the Modernism Lab would be, Professor Lewis still wanted the virtual research lab to refer back to some of the traditional research methodologies of old – getting note cards, jotting down notes while reading, and eventually going back and trying to make sense of and organize it all. In this way, the tool is as aimed at the individual researcher as it is at the collective of researchers contributing to the database. In this sense, Professor Lewis’ use of Ynote is truly informed by the laboratory model.
Once Ynote was created, Professor Lewis’ students participated collectively in a virtual laboratory environment dedicated to furthering the body of knowledge that constitutes Literary Modernism. One of the chief values of the Modernism Lab is that the body of knowledge contained within is added to with each subsequent offering of the course.
Ynote is also utilized by other professors and courses, such as Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen’s Kevin Roche Seminar, which features an architecture archive. Ynote can easily be adapted to a variety of disciplines and functions. In Ynote, Yianni clarified, an “object” is the essential unit of any database. An “object” is, simply put, the thing one is studying. It can be any or all combinations of the following: people, places, events, files, images, audio, video. Yianni tried to build Ynote such that one could add different objects as required by subject matter. A majority of fields can be customized according to the professor’s (and students’) sense of how he or she (or they) would like to structure the information flow of the database. Depending on how one chooses to stratify and organize the database, one can showcase and privilege information that would be lost, or at least subordinated, in a typical bibliographic entry in a program such as Endnote. In addition, Ynote allows researchers using the database to draw on and search for the relationships among various “objects.”
In The Modernism Lab, Professor Lewis and his students focused primarily on documenting a group of authors in the notecard field of Ynote. What emerged through using Ynote, however, was that the most notable developments in, or objects of, English Literary Modernism were actually events. Hence, most entries and relationships among objects in the Modernism Lab refer back to events.
Yianni then pointed out the anatomy of the Modernism Lab administrative view that allows collaborators to add information in a variety of ways. To create an entry, the first thing one does is to “add” an “event.” Then one adds information to the various fields listed under “event:” “excerpt,” which allows one to input a quote from a primary source; “remarks,” a space for one’s own thoughts on the excerpt; “source,” a bibliographic-style entry which leads one to a new reference page where you can catalog the reference. Some fields are fill-in and others are drop-down. The “create a collection” page permits one to filter and collect objects pertinent to one’s own individual research. In this individual view, one can re-order objects as well as outline new hierarchies, and create tabbed entries.
Yianni underscored that Ynote is capable of handling thousands of entries. The Modernism Lab already has around 2500, one thousand of which are dedicated to Virginia Woolf. Appended to the Modernism Lab is a wiki that functions as a storehouse for the papers students produced in the course while contributing to the lab database. With each offering of the course, the body of knowledge that is Modernism is advanced, rather than repeated, with the aid of the lab and the wiki.
Yianni finished by saying that Ynote is currently being used by two Yale faculty members and it is in development for Directed Studies courses, which will likely use a timeline feature as the front end for their Ynote instances. Students will simply have to click on a feature of the timeline to access information under a wide range of fields. In the future Yianni would also like to add “nodal” relationships, and data export features to Ynote.