Collaborative authoring, evolution, and personalization for a "transdisciplinary" textbook

Abstract

This article is a case study about a book titled The Discipline of Organizing, which proposes a transdisciplinary synthesis of ideas from library and information science, computer science, informatics, cognitive science, business, and other disciplines that "intentionally arrange collections of resources to enable interactions with them." This case study discusses the interrelationships between the transdisciplinary goal for the book, the process of collaborative authoring required to write it, the novel architecture of the book's content, and the innovative reading experiences in print and ebook formats that are enabled. The idea that a new discipline is contextualized by more specific concepts and methods inevitably led to a collaboratively-authored book whose design embodies this intellectual architecture. The book's content is organized as a transdisciplinary core with supplemental content identified by discipline. This content model creates a "family of books" with thousands of siblings, any of which can be published in print or as an ebook by filtering on the disciplinary attributes. This "design-time" customization has been extended to enable "reading-time" personalization for ebook formats. In addition, the rich semantic markup that enables customization and personalization is fodder for further experimentation about "smart textbooks" that can be continuously made smarter by dynamic discovery and inclusion of content.