Overhaul of metadata in Stylo

In the Stylo text editor, the metadata management module is currently fully integrated with the text editor, a setup inherited from the platform’s early versions. Through this project, we aim to develop a new metadata management module specifically designed to meet the needs of scholarly journals in the humanities and to accommodate Stylo’s ongoing developments.

Issues

The input of metadata is carried out using the YAML format. One of the advantages of this format is that it provides us with great flexibility in structuring the metadata for Stylo articles. Until now, in Stylo, we have focused on so-called generic articles that can adapt to all types of journals. However, recent usage of Stylo shows us that we need to structure our metadata differently: 1) to generate metadata structures specific to certain journals, and 2) to generate metadata structures for other types of publications (theses, dissertations, books, etc.).

Given the complexity of this task, several issues arise from these needs:

• What constitutes a metadata structure for a type of publication? What elements do we need to make explicit and formal, and why? In other words, what could the meaningful metadata structures be?
• The integration of several different metadata sheets into the text editor also raises questions of adoption and usage by the user community. This project will introduce a significant set of new behaviors within Stylo. Consequently, a design issue emerges from this overhaul.

Technical challenges

The technical issues are mentioned in the project wiki on Stylo's github, see <https://github.com/EcrituresNumeriques/stylo/wiki/Cahier-refonte-des-métadonnées>.

Another part of these issues are visible in the project milestones on github, see the discussions in each of the milestone tickets<https://github.com/EcrituresNumeriques/stylo/milestone/5>.

Research activities

• Design workshops
• Experiments with various journals and users
• Interviews with users

Deliverables

We plan to deliver several artefacts. First, there will be a new version of Stylo (Stylo 3.1 for sure); then we'll write a report about the developments, including all the discussions and theoretical reasons behind each technical choice implemented. Finally, we'll produce documentation tailored to all these new changes, so that users can take full advantage of this functionality.