Here's the transcript (in a raw form). The task is done when we've done enough to check, improve and share the content.
one of the things we've done at iu is indiana university has selected
press books as a platform to try to get instructors to create their
textbooks in especially if they're trying to create like an open
educational resource or at least a free course pack or textbook for
students and pressbooks is essentially a specialized version of
wordpress software um with additional pieces around the idea that
you're making a book and it has the ability to actually go to
publishers but you can also output it as a pdf and it knows pagination
but you can also export it as epub you can open it up inside of a
course and things like that as well and so if you want to see it
inside of you know like what the higher ed advertisement for it is i
don't know why this is coming up saying old press books but there's a
video on there about press books in our in the classroom and some
links to some example press books as well but it does have the ability
inside of press books it's not on by default unfortunately but you can
configure it to where you can input latex markup for math and then it
will render that um as mathml and the epub or you know it'll present
it in a web page with math jacks and things like that but um we have
been it is pretty easy to make accessible stem content uh using this
uh platform it has its limitations like everything but it's what we've
been promoting for our faculty here i'm i'm gonna make a suggestion
mcgorr hills the encyclopedia of science and technology i'm being
shown that do you want to talk about that yeah this is um a project
that mcgraw-hill undertook a number of years back to publish this
encyclopedia 20 volume encyclopedia using tools that would help
produce also a digital document or product let's just call it a
product it was done in sgml with an sgml document type definition and
entirely descriptive markup it went to press from these sgml files and
produced a pretty creditable work of typography including math
chemical formulas all done through this sgml source so in in the end
the only things that were kind of indigestible were sampled images
that were photographs now the the thing that made the the bridge
between the html and the printed page was tech and and yet at the same
time the sgml was primary so other products could be created from it
and this is an instance of what i think of as multi-purposing of
course sgml is really old school now it's been pretty much supplanted
with x xml that's okay xml has all the power that sgml did and it
still supports this multi-purposing so i'm going to circle back to
something kelly mentioned i think kelly you're looking at people who
are creating documents creating content and people who are consuming
content uh so you're looking at an entire system and this is where
systems thinking comes into the picture very very powerful to look at
this whole thing from a systems point of view and uh i think that
multi-purposing uh as a kind of a hallmark of how we create our
documents is is key but a document that sort of has the ability to be
multi-purposed is much richer than what we're used to creating
therefore it's more expensive to produce and this particular project
by mcgraw-hill was significantly more expensive in production than
other approaches which by the way would not have allowed the
multiversing and and the residue of one edition would be completely
unusable by the succeeding edition and encyclopedias of course need to
be kept up to date so that's a significant value so that's kind of how
i'm bringing all these pieces together in that case study what kind of
other renderings besides the the hardback print copy that they
actually what other products did they produce from that did they
recoup that extra expense well i wish i could answer these questions
because i i had a role to play in the process as a consultant for the
pre-press firm that created the camera ready copy for the print
product but they their feet were being held to the fire because their
digital files were ultimately supposed to be handed back to the
publisher to mcgraw-hill and passed on to another person who would
then create a digital product multimedia interactive encyclopedia with
all of the content that the paper encyclopedia had but accessible
through a computer and um the the fun thing about this project for me
was that i got to talk to that person so two different arms of
production we got to actually talk to each other and that's not
commonplace at all usually somebody writes the checks but but we don't
talk to each other you get the idea so um i wish i had uh an instance
of that particular product to show you uh but what i've understood was
that it was successfully created now here's the question that you
asked that i can't answer did it pay off and i'm afraid that uh it
probably didn't i watched i watched how difficult it was for people to
cleave to a descriptive markup but at the same time produce formatted
pages that met the requirements of the print product and and people
who who do book publishing from say lottex source understand the issue
um but it can be kind of nightmarish at times and a lot of times we
insert procedural markup into our documents in order to accomplish
getting things formatted the way we like to see them and of course
procedural markup defies descriptive markup fortunately with sgml i
was able to encapsulate all of the procedural markup in what are
called processing instructions so it was simply a process of stripping
out all the processing instructions from the sgml stream and it sort
of restored the document to its original descriptive markup so that
that's how things look under the hood
The video for this clip is here (YouTube).
Here's the transcript (in a raw form). The task is done when we've done enough to check, improve and share the content.
one of the things we've done at iu is indiana university has selected press books as a platform to try to get instructors to create their textbooks in especially if they're trying to create like an open educational resource or at least a free course pack or textbook for students and pressbooks is essentially a specialized version of wordpress software um with additional pieces around the idea that you're making a book and it has the ability to actually go to publishers but you can also output it as a pdf and it knows pagination but you can also export it as epub you can open it up inside of a course and things like that as well and so if you want to see it inside of you know like what the higher ed advertisement for it is i don't know why this is coming up saying old press books but there's a video on there about press books in our in the classroom and some links to some example press books as well but it does have the ability inside of press books it's not on by default unfortunately but you can configure it to where you can input latex markup for math and then it will render that um as mathml and the epub or you know it'll present it in a web page with math jacks and things like that but um we have been it is pretty easy to make accessible stem content uh using this uh platform it has its limitations like everything but it's what we've been promoting for our faculty here i'm i'm gonna make a suggestion mcgorr hills the encyclopedia of science and technology i'm being shown that do you want to talk about that yeah this is um a project that mcgraw-hill undertook a number of years back to publish this encyclopedia 20 volume encyclopedia using tools that would help produce also a digital document or product let's just call it a product it was done in sgml with an sgml document type definition and entirely descriptive markup it went to press from these sgml files and produced a pretty creditable work of typography including math chemical formulas all done through this sgml source so in in the end the only things that were kind of indigestible were sampled images that were photographs now the the thing that made the the bridge between the html and the printed page was tech and and yet at the same time the sgml was primary so other products could be created from it and this is an instance of what i think of as multi-purposing of course sgml is really old school now it's been pretty much supplanted with x xml that's okay xml has all the power that sgml did and it still supports this multi-purposing so i'm going to circle back to something kelly mentioned i think kelly you're looking at people who are creating documents creating content and people who are consuming content uh so you're looking at an entire system and this is where systems thinking comes into the picture very very powerful to look at this whole thing from a systems point of view and uh i think that multi-purposing uh as a kind of a hallmark of how we create our documents is is key but a document that sort of has the ability to be multi-purposed is much richer than what we're used to creating therefore it's more expensive to produce and this particular project by mcgraw-hill was significantly more expensive in production than other approaches which by the way would not have allowed the multiversing and and the residue of one edition would be completely unusable by the succeeding edition and encyclopedias of course need to be kept up to date so that's a significant value so that's kind of how i'm bringing all these pieces together in that case study what kind of other renderings besides the the hardback print copy that they actually what other products did they produce from that did they recoup that extra expense well i wish i could answer these questions because i i had a role to play in the process as a consultant for the pre-press firm that created the camera ready copy for the print product but they their feet were being held to the fire because their digital files were ultimately supposed to be handed back to the publisher to mcgraw-hill and passed on to another person who would then create a digital product multimedia interactive encyclopedia with all of the content that the paper encyclopedia had but accessible through a computer and um the the fun thing about this project for me was that i got to talk to that person so two different arms of production we got to actually talk to each other and that's not commonplace at all usually somebody writes the checks but but we don't talk to each other you get the idea so um i wish i had uh an instance of that particular product to show you uh but what i've understood was that it was successfully created now here's the question that you asked that i can't answer did it pay off and i'm afraid that uh it probably didn't i watched i watched how difficult it was for people to cleave to a descriptive markup but at the same time produce formatted pages that met the requirements of the print product and and people who who do book publishing from say lottex source understand the issue um but it can be kind of nightmarish at times and a lot of times we insert procedural markup into our documents in order to accomplish getting things formatted the way we like to see them and of course procedural markup defies descriptive markup fortunately with sgml i was able to encapsulate all of the procedural markup in what are called processing instructions so it was simply a process of stripping out all the processing instructions from the sgml stream and it sort of restored the document to its original descriptive markup so that that's how things look under the hood