The Provision of Digital Apparatus for Use in Experimental Interfaces

Abstract

In this article, we discuss the various ways in which the experiments we have been doing within the INKE Interface Design team and elsewhere are predicated on the availability of “digital apparatus” – various forms of metadata that can be made consistently available. These include structural, procedural, and semantic markup, digital indexes, textual variants, annotations, regularized citations, and taxonomies of references, to name a few. While some affordances are agnostic to the very existence of metadata, in some crucial instances the metadata is essential. The question we hope to address in these cases is the extent to which the new affordances are actually of sufficient potential benefit to the community to warrant being produced and maintained.