LC0bA5: ^

Evolving Datacase Designs: 4 Examples (8)
A Case Analysis Support Environment (5)
— CASE lays out early goals and reports on a Xerox Dandelion based effort.
The Psychology of the Particular (8)
— A Hypercard instantiation of “Cognition and Computers” and “Computer Experience and Cognitive Development.”
Digital Biography and The Hypercard Society of Mind (8)
— During discussions with Minsky on preserving academic corpora, I wrote “Cameo 4. Digital Biographies.”
— Next followed discussions with Selfridge and design ideas for seeing a Scholar’s Corpus as a datacase. Work was begun on a Minsky Datacase as a worthwhile example of adding value through computer implementation; one novelty was the replication and distribution of index components relevant to any particular page into a background field of that page.
Secondary Analysis: Hartley Hale (14)
— The “Hartley Hale Datacase” was derived from Robert W. White’s Lives in Progress, relating that published material to grounds for the study archived at the Henry Murray Research Center for the study of human lives. The goal was to relate published interpretations to archived sources, and more generally, to explore the potential and problems for secondary analysis of important corpora; this was seen to include the issue of online reference to offline literature, based on an analysis of references in George Goethals book, Experiencing Youth.
Summary: Efforts and Lessons Learned (5)
— These were the background for developing the RING Design.

RING: A File Assembly Facility (10)
— RING was a design for interconnecting assemblies of files, each of which was an instance of a common shell created by uploading different ascii content files. Links within and among text strings in files of the assembly created a logical linking which was updated by cycles of downloading ascii files after online modification, index element sorting and index recreation on subsequent file reconstructions.
Usefulness Of The RING Facility (9)
— RING file assemblies demonstrations were created for several works; parts of the Infant Peggy Study (LC3); a facility for critiquing language translations (using La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque); comparision of variations of literary works (focused on Arthur Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night and The City and the Stars); and a facility for untangling the cross references in Nabokov’s Pale Fire.
— Ultimately, the broad acceptance of different software developments (HTML, WWW, and page-count ordered search returns) made it useless to continue development of RING. But lessons were learned that continue to inform subsequent efforts to develop case study archives. (See Appendix C “The Role of Modelling In Case Study Analysis” (6)

Subsequent efforts undertaken are:
NLCSA v.0.1, the first attempt to create the Natural Learning Case Study Archive (of content accessible generally in an early form at “NLCSA.org/L&C”), was given over for two reasons. Firstly, Builder wanted to focus on the content of the site, so a software technology which offered themes for initial instantiation and permitted later skin changes was preferred; WordPress does precisely that. Secondly, someday the pursuit of these goals will be a work for others. A popular software environment where there are many people with excellent skills is the best choice. This is what Builder sees in the WordPress community.

NLCSA.net, this WordPress instantiation, is the latest effort at constructing a datacase useful for Case Study Analysis.