The 17^th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng 2017) seeks original research papers that focus on the design, implementation, development, management, use and evaluation of advanced systems where document and document collections play a key role. DocEng emphasizes innovative approaches to document engineering technology, use of documents and document collections in real-world applications, novel principles, tools and processes that improve our ability to create, manage, maintain, share, and productively use these. In particular, DocEng 2017 seeks works involving large-scale document engineering applications of industrial relevance. You are invited to submit original papers to DocEng 2017, to be held in Valetta, Malta. Attendees at this international forum have interests that span all aspects of document engineering and applications.

Summary of Events

Best Paper Awards

Nominations for best paper awards:

1. The intangible nature of drama documents: an FRBR view by Vincenzo Lombardo, Rossana Damiano and Antonio Pizzo
2. Effective Floating Strategies by Frank Mittelbach
3. The Mitchell Library WordCloud: Beyond Boolean Search by Monika Schwarz, Kim Marriott and Jon McCormack
4. The RASH Javascript Editor (RAJE): a wordprocessor for writing Web-first scholarly articles by Gianmarco Spinaci, Silvio Peroni, Angelo Di Iorio, Francesco Poggi and Fabio Vitali
5. Towards a Transcription System of Sign Language Video Resources via Motion Trajectory Factorisation by Mark Borg and Kenneth Camilleri
6. Linear Extended Annotation Graphs by Vincent Barrellon, Pierre-Edouard Portier, Sylvie Calabretto and Olivier Ferret

Winners of best paper awards:

1. Best Paper Award awarded to Towards a Transcription System of Sign Language Video Resources via Motion Trajectory Factorisation by Mark Borg and Kenneth Camilleri
2. Best Student Paper Award awarded to Linear Extended Annotation Graphs by Vincent Barrellon, Pierre-Edouard Portier, Sylvie Calabretto and Olivier Ferret

DocEng 2018

DocEng 2018 will be taking place in Halifax, Canada. More information about Halifax may be found here.

Birds of a Feather Sessions

The Future of Scholarly Publishing

This discussion was centred around two main topics. First, we put into question the current concept of a single, definitive version of a publication that cannot be changed afterwards. A participant mentioned the example of critical editions of works, where the beginning is often already out of date before the complete edition has been finished. Even if the objective of a publication is to document the state at a certain point of time, new knowledge becoming available after publication might affect our understanding of the work, and would warrant at least an editorial note, so that scholars reading the article are not misled.

A closely related topic was the impact that social media has had on our lives, and what part this may play in the ecosystem of academic publishing. If academics could gain credit not just for publishing, but also for contributing to discussions about published articles, this could lead to much better, more fluid exchange of ideas. Also, the idea of including supplemental files and even executables in papers (the former is new to DocEng this year; the latter is becoming common in other fields) was mentioned.

The second main topic was the role of paper - or digital print-oriented documents such as PDF - in the future of scientific publishing. We had this topic at the BoF at DocEng 2013 in Florence and it was interesting to see if opinions had changed in the four years in between. Most participants still believed that paper has affordances that cannot be matched by digital; it divides the material into sizeable "chunks" that make it easier for us to comprehend, and provides a very intuitive referencing system at the same time. Alternative referencing systems for responsive layouts, e.g. paragraph numbers in the margin that can be shown/hidden on requrest, were also discussed.

Finally, even for page numbers as a referencing system, some counter-examples were given. For example, different editions of a literary work will likely have different page numbers; the same problem applies also to musical works, where section markers (typically "A", "B", "C", ...), which enable referencing across different instruments (with different page numbers), are also editorial additions, and incompatible across different editions or publishers.

Small Form Factors

We need to be able to extract content and metadata from existing documents, and then repurpose and recreate documents suitable for the smaller platforms. Questions that arise include: what are the capabilities of the smaller devices? How do we represent and model those capabilities? Do we need a new life cycle of documents? Do we need to redefine the term document? Is content a separate concept? We need user studies to answer these questions. What is the impact on, and of, social media, with respect to these questions?