Aleko
Konstantinov is a late 19 century author whose works for the first time opened
the Bulgarian cultural space towards the European and American culture. There
are three basic arguments to choose this author for the HyperLearning purposes:
- The main motifs in his novelettes, travel notes and
feuilletons are related to the travel as a way to define national identity. The
inter-cultural communication's initiation became the focal point in Aleko's
writings. The result was the creation of the most-emblematic national
character, Bay Ganyo, who is a cultural, literary and national focus of each
Bulgarian generation.
- Aleko's topics and ideas discuss both the open and the
closed character of national culture, the integration and preservation of
national uniqueness, the dynamic and controversial contact of the
"own" with the "other's."
- Aleko's works affirm the values of the modern European man
as a model for the ethical development of the individual in the environment of
a post-colonial society. His life and works build an image of a perfect
idealist, with clear and firm moral principles, with an active civil position and
readiness for social action.
There is a
strong demand for a comprehensive digital collection of materials by and
related to the author in searchable indexed form, available to any researcher
with Internet access. The members of the Bulgarian team have identified this
need both in their own research efforts and in their teaching activities. The
access to a large number of materials that are part of the cultural heritage
remains physically limited in many cases to a single user at a time, since the
originals haven't been reproduced in any widely useable form. The access is in
fact restricted by availability, even if legally it is more or less free. The
indices - traditionally chronological - of archived materials are stored in the
archives themselves, meaning that the researcher needs to visit the site just
to study the map.
In
Konstantinov's case, there are at least three such major "maps" which
are to some extent overlapping but not identical - one in the Bulgarian Academy
of Sciences, one in the National Library, and another in the author's museum in
Svishtov. Furthermore, the court transcripts of the legal cases Konstantinov
has led as an attorney are kept in various collections at the City Prosecutor's
Office, the Court of Appeals, the Ministry of Justice, and others. Letters,
memoirs, objects, and other memorabilia are scattered around the globe and even
a comprehensive map of the sources, where they are located and why - the first
step of the project - is of significant research value. One that is freely
accessible on the Internet is even more valuable.
The scientific
research work is usually comprised of two phases - learn to use, and use to learn. The first phase when the
researcher is learning how and where to find and obtain relevant materials is extremely
important and so far a comprehensive knowledge about the available sources has
been an essential virtue of any person considered an authority on the subject.
With the advent of the information technology, however, this part of the
research process started to appear also extremely cumbersome. It is
particularly striking for a person who comes from software development, for
instance, to the field of humanities, where the phrase "you can find that
on the Net" is seldom heard. On the other hand, the learning
process in humanities is inherently hyper-textual. While working with text A, a
researcher finds reference to text B, which in turn relates to the event C,
documented in source D, and so forth. The traditional retrieval of items A, B,
C and D, however, has been time-consuming and costly. An Internet-based
hyper-platform can facilitate this process by orders of magnitude. In the case
of Konstantinov, where a researcher faces a lot of social, political, economic,
as well as geographic references, the proposed comprehensive collection of
interconnected material should become indispensable. The "learn-to-use" part will be basically transparent for any
researcher with basic Internet knowledge, allowing much more "use-to-learn" time than
previously imaginable.
A completely
new option is to use the repository of material combined with the interactivity
of the platform to build guided-learning materials in the form of eLessons
and eCourses. A teacher can thus use the system to build a
presentation as a visual aid to their lecture before an auditorium with
Internet access, or to develop an entirely "unmanned" teaching
course. Since the system will be open to the broader academic community, it
will thus provide also an exchange of views on the methodology of studies.
The main
challenge so far for almost any Internet-based project to assist humanitarian
studies is that scholars either cannot find what they are looking for or doubt
the credibility of the source. The project proposed addresses both issues by
first, aiming to provide as large as possible collection of materials both by
and related to the author, and second, by ensuring that the team is comprised
of experienced scholars and publishers, applying the high editorial standards
associated with academic publishing.
The project
will proceed in two general stages, which will require different allocation of
work resources. During the first stage, most of the efforts will be directed at
the gathering of material, its digital preparation and availability. Until a
"critical mass" of available content is reached and the interface for
its efficient usage is tested and proven, the access to the project will be
limited to those involved in its development. Only in its second stage the
hyper-learning platform will open to the broader public and the team will
direct most of its efforts to promote it to the scholarly community and the
general audience. In this stage the scholars and researchers actively involved
in the project will also contribute an initial batch of original work on the
author, utilizing the hyper-learning platform as fully as possible. There is
little doubt that during the initial stage, the team involved in the project
will find more than enough under-researched material to serve as a base for new
studies or critical essays. At the end of the second stage, there is expected
to be sustained flow of new contributions from the scientific community,
further expanding the project's content base.
The objectives of the Stage 1 (18 months) are as follows:
- To create a
virtual community for collaborative research, teaching and learning on the
internet that generates new forms of learning through open access to primary
sources and scholarly research.To design the structure of an author hypertext
on Konstantinov (HyperKonstantinov);
- To catalogue
the primary sources concerning Konstantinov's Bay Ganyo (The work Bay Ganyo is a key one both for Aleko Konstantinov and for the
Bulgarian culture within European context. Its popularity in the country and
abroad surpasses any other Bulgarian literary work from the past 150 years. It
is a constant source of national self-knowledge in the globalization process);
- To implement
that part of the hypertext which is dedicated to the management of the
topography of annotations to the manuscript pages; the submitting of
facsimiles, bibliographical files, transcriptions, critical essays,
translations, and audio-visual recordings;
- To insert in HyperKonstantinov an initial core set
of digitalized primary sources and scholarly contributions related to the Bay Ganyo;
- To found an
editorial board responsible for evaluating the contributions submitted for
publication;
- To establish
collaborative relationships with other research groups that are working on
Konstantinov, and with public institutions and individuals who possess other
manuscripts by Konstantinov or other relevant primary sources;
- To organize a
public seminar on the Bay Ganyo,
which will be made accessible via Live Web-Casting through the general
HyperLearning site, and from which recordings will be inserted successively in HyperKonstantinov.
The practical
implementation of these objectives pass through the following activities:
Activity I. Build a comprehensive list of
the available material to be processed and included - where it is located, in
what form, the best ways for its digitization, display, indexing and
hierarchical presentation.
Activity II.
Procurement of the hardware and development of the software needed to carry out
the work identified in Part I. Assembling a team, assigning tasks, and
preparation of the digitized material.
Activity III.
Development of the user interaction with the content prepared in Parts I and
II.
- indices with
various degrees of complexity, systems for search and retrieval of documents;
- various display
options for various types of content - graphical, textual, multimedia; options
for efficient bandwidth usage - partial display, abstracts, thumbnails;
- personalized
user workspaces: saved searches, virtual "personal bookshelves" with
hyperlinks to materials each registered user has gathered for specific
purposes;
Activity IV.
Development of a system for scholarly contributions - an interface for
submitting original critical works, essays and other academic texts to the
editorial board for peer review and subsequent online publishing.
Activity V.
eLessons and eCourses: development of a teaching system for building a
"virtual lecture" including parts of the available material and
critical contributions in the form of an interactive online presentation and
the subsequent combining of a number of lectures into a whole course of study.
After the first 18
months (First stage), the team aims to have at least one third of the planned
materials in each category processed, and the interface for their access and
display to be ready. The software for the personalized experience - personal
bookshelves, eLesson and eCourse builders - is also planned to be developed
over the first 18 months. It will be later extended and fine-tuned mostly with
user feedback.
In practice during the First
stage all the documents, archive material, and objects, manuscripts, letters,
memoirs and published works will be digitized and accessible in HyperKonstantinov.
Primary sources will be digitized in color and in high quality. The texts and
the multimedia contributions will be encoded according to standards chosen in
collaboration with partners working on MEDIS (Multimedia Encoding and Documents
Interoperability Standard).
A complete bibliography of texts from and about Aleko
Konstantiniv (AK) will be included. The
critical texts (1895 to present) will be selected on the principle "the
best and the newest." Another important task of the AK part of project is to
compile a selection of interpretations created in painting, graphic art, and especially
in cartoons. These visual readings contain many profound discoveries on the
Bulgarian character and its attitude towards Europe.
During the first 18 months, pilot clips will be prepared to complete the
multimedia integration of the AKPS within the hypertext. There are two goals:
to show the cinematographic reading of the text in time, and to create a visual
perspective for future readings. The core of the work is the feature film and
the TV version of "Bay Ganyo". It will feature material from the
Bulgarian National TV Archive, which has a computerized catalogue (about 37% of
the archive data is entered into the ISIS
software.)
Six monthly seminars are to be transmitted via
Webcasting. The general topic of the seminars will be "Aleko Konstantinov.
Bay Ganyo" and each seminar will have a different subtopic and a keynote
speaker. The keynote speaker in each event will be a leading Bulgarian
authority on the subject or a guest speaker from a European country. Each event
will have a moderator, who will be one of the associate directors of the
project from the Bulgarian part. The event will be broadcasted live and will be
accessible to the university centers with organized groups of researchers, who
will have the option to participate in real time. Initial contacts are
established with such centers in Gent (Belgium),
Lille (France),
St. Petersburg (Russia),
Open University (London), Northwestern
University (Chicago, USA),
University of Pittsburgh (USA). The goal of the seminars will be to create a
bridge for the humanitarian knowledge through reading, reflection, and speaking
on the chosen author and work. The results will be published and archived.
During the
Second stage of the project (beyond the first 18 months) the rest of the
author's works will be gradually included in HyperKonstantinov. The Virtual
Collaborative Learning Communities network
in Bulgaria
will be further developed and enhanced, and a Workshop dedicated to the gaps in
the researches undertaken so far on Aleko Konmstantinov and its work will be
organized in order to identify the thematic and ideological scope of this area,
within which any new reasearch would represent an added value. On-line seminars
will be held with other HyperLearning teams, interested in comparative studies
on the differnet authors included in the project (among which is Aleko). Subjet
themes of interest to the international research community and which, if
developed, would contribute to the European cultural area, will be identified. One
edition of the HLOM (HyperLearning OnLine Magazine) will be dedicated to Aleko
Konstantinov. A HyperKonstantinov Virtual
Library will be created and a PrintOnDemand service will be established to meet
the HyperLearning needs. Workshops and seminars will be organized on regional
and international levels - on-line or at
a suitable place as appropriate.
The placement of Aleko Konstantinov in a Hyperlearning
environment creates a new ground for academic, humanitarian, and civil
education, which will be accessible for national and international cultural and
scientific centers; it enables a comprehensive collection of presently
scattered archive and documental heritage. The Hyperlearning platform is a
unique environment for new research and learning; it combines and creates a
rich and ever-growing critical context, which
would be unthinkable in terms of volume, means of usage, and efficiency if it
had to be done in "paper technology." HyperKonstantinov is posed to
form an authoritative and unique Center for generation of new knowledge. The final
goal is to create a learning environment, channeling the interests and
intellectual energy of researchers, students and citizens, in which young
people gain experience "to
understand themselves, and to understand others through a better understanding
of the world." (UNESCO Report, 1996, p. 45)
2nd H-L Workshop ″From
HyperNietzsche to Hyper-Learning″.
Kloster Seeon, 22 - 25 October 2004
