Research Catalogue Extended Guide

December 2024

About this guide

This is the extended guide. It tries to be as complete as possible manual for all features of the RC. If you just want to get started quickly with creating an exposition, be sure to check the quick start guide or the video tutorials first.

About the Research Catalogue

The Research Catalogue (RC) is a non-commercial, collaboration and publishing platform for artistic research provided by the Society for Artistic Research. The RC is free to use and access for artists and researchers. It serves also as a backbone for teaching purposes, student assessment, peer review workflows and research funding administration. It strives to be an open space for experimentation and exchange.

Research Catalogue (RC) content presented through some of our portals is peer reviewed, while the remaining expositions and other information are quality controlled by the individual author(s) themselves. As a result, the RC is highly inclusive.

The open access and open source spirit of the RC is essential to its nature and serves its function as a connective and transitional layer between academic discourse and artistic practice, thereby constituting a discursive field for artistic research.

The Research Catalogue is provided by the Society for Artistic Research (SAR).

What is the RC used for?

Research Catalogue can be used for creating research documentation, editing articles, reports, collaborative writing, thesis/dissertation works, peer reviewed journal publications and class logbooks.

It can also be used to present research data in a human friendly layout.

What is an RC Exposition ?

Unlike traditional research repositories, which present data as PDF documents or folders of files, the RC employs a unique exposition format: a free form, flexible and media-friendly webpage.

This format is particularly well-suited for merging different forms of media and text into a single highly customizable presentation. The flexibility in structure accommodates the diverse, context-specific needs of organizing materials produced in artistic research.

If you want to know more this may be a good starting point:
Expositionality in Action (Michael Schwab 2024)

Connection Between RC and JAR

The RC forms the technical backbone of the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR): potential JAR expositions emerge from the range of the artistic research activities taking place in the RC. Moreover, submissions and peer-reviewing for JAR takes place in the RC. Expositions published in JAR are either nominated by authors, or directly selected by JAR editorial board.

Setting up a New Account

When you register an account in the RC, you will first just have a basic account. This will allow you to be a supervisor, review expositions, and leave comments. Some application calls may also accept limited user accounts to submit forms.

Limited accounts do not have the option to create expositions or publish work. Due to copyright laws, if you are interested in making your content public in the Research Catalogue, you need to register as author by upgrading your limited account to a full account. Important: if you are a student or staff member of an institution that has a portal within the RC, you should contact your local portal admin for upgrading to a full account. You can find the contact info of portal admins here.

The account upgrade is free of charge. You can upgrade your limited account by logging in, and clicking “request upgrade”, where you will be instructed to send in a proof of identity to support@researchcatalogue.net. Please read about “safe upgrade” below, to make sure you send this information safely.

Limited account Full Account
comment comment
review review
create applications (not all) create applications
create expositions
use the media repository
collaborate

Safe Upgrade

support@researchcatalogue.net supports OpenPGP email signing to prevent sensitive information from going lost. If you have never used OpenPGP, by far, the easiest way is to use Mozilla’s Thunderbird application, which has OpenPGP built-in, is free and well documented.

You may find this resource by Mozilla useful: Mozilla Help: I have never used OpenPGP before

Institutional Portals, Journals and Project Portals

It is possible for institutions to open their own Institutional Portal in the Research Catalogue. Having a portal will allow institutions to:

For more information, please contact Society for Artistic Research (SAR).

More on portals and portal administration can be found in the admin section of this manual.

How to Find Expositions and Research ?

You can search the RC by using the search field in the top right corner. Moreover you can use the “advanced search” functionality, which allows for filtered searches and and searches according to specific criteria such as object type, keywords, authors, etc.

Visual Map

A visual way of exploring content in the Research Catalogue. This map actually allows you to do normal search, but the results are miniatures of the actual content of the exposition: https://map.rcdata.org

Researchers

You can find all researchers with public content of the RC here: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/portal/researchers?publicObjects=1

Journals

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/portal/journals All journals listed here are open for submissions, but do visit their portal first to see specific requirements/calls.

Institutional Portals

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/portal/institutions

Projects

These are for (time limited) Research Projects.

Follow

It is possible to “follow” other users, portals, and objects such as expositions and works. Once you are logged in you will see “follow” links in the bottom right corner of objects displayed on the front page, other user’s pages and other places on the RC. “Follow” links also appear on user and portal profile pages. Once you follow a user, portal, or object new publications, edits, comments etc. will be displayed on the “FEEDS” page. Clicking the wrench icon opens up a dialog in which you can adjust the precise information you want to see for each user, portal or object you follow.

Navigation while reading expositions

navigation

When one moves the mouse cursor to the top of an exposition, a menu bar appears.

the RC navigation bar

The navigation bar contains, from left to right:

Takes you to the metadata page, which shows the full set of metadata related to the exposition: author(s), keywords, abstract, creation date, publication date and copyright & licenses of all used media files.


There are a couple of functions available:
- hide notes (hide all notes) - show open notes (show only notes that are open) - show resolved notes (show the resolved notes) - add new note (open a note tool) - previous note (jump to previous note) - next note (jump to next note)

Comments

Shows the latest and previous comments on your exposition from the RC community.

Terms of Use

This displays the terms of as set by the Society for Artistic Research (SAR).

Licenses

Authors can choose different licenses for both their expositions and media. A license specifies under what conditions your material - or cannot - be (re)used. All rights reserved is the most strict license: it means that people need your permission to use any material. Choosing a less restrictive Creative Commons license makes it easier for your materials to be used, reproduced and distributed by others.

Peer-reviewed journals may have differing views on licenses, usually based on the requirements of Open Access.

You can get help choosing the right license on the Creative Commons website: https://creativecommons.org/choose/ and https://creativecommons.org/faq/.

Abbreviations:

Please visit https://creativecommons.org for full license information.

Full List of License Options

The RC default is CC-BY-NC-ND.

Profile Page

The RC profile page is both the central hub for your activities on the RC and a public presentation of your research. You can create a detailed public profile containing two main sections. The first section contains biographical data, information on projects and events. The second section is a list of your RC objects, such as media sets and expositions.

Only expositions which are shared or published will be visible to others. Additionally, you can hide groupings of expositions through the small dot next to the grouping.

If you are a reviewer, you will also see the headers “Exposition Reviewing” or “Application Reviewing” on your own profile, containing links to the expositions they have been assigned to.

Profile Section

View Public Profile

You can switch between your profile’s editing mode (which includes all your private work in progress) and your public profile, which is the profile as other users see it. Click on “my profile” for the editing mode and - below your profile picture - click “view public profile” to see how other people see your profile.

view public profile

Description

You can add a biography or text, that other RC users will see when they visit your profile. If you want, you can also add a tagline, set your country of residence, and list your research interests. You can also change the email address associated with your RC account that will be used to log in and notify you if you have turned on notifications. Your email address is never shared publicly. Click “edit profile” to edit all these properties.

Uploading a CV

In addition to the profile description, it is possible to upload a more extended CV as a PDF. To do so, click “upload cv” below your profile picture.

upload your cv

Member of

As a user you can request membership of (some of the) RC portals. Certain actions can only be done if one is a member of the portal. For example: for some application programs, it may be required that you are member of the portal before you are able to submit an application for a program.

In most cases however, it is the task of the portal admin to make you a member of their portal. Most portals therefore do not allow users to request membership themselves.

Click “edit” to request / widthdraw a portal membership.

Research Section

Create Exposition

By clicking “Create exposition” you can create a new exposition object which will be opened in the RC exposition workspace editor. The title, copyright and abstract fields are required. In most cases, copyright is assigned to the main author of the exposition. You can change these details later by choosing ☰ > edit details, or in the workspace editor by clicking the title of your research (at the top of you screen).

There are three types of exposition on the RC:

For a description of the differences, please consult editor comparison section.

create exposition

Exposition Details Menu

the “hamburger” menu

To access the menu, click on the “hamburger” menu icon, located in the bottom right corner of an object (expositions or works). Some options are only available to the author of the object.

Change Layout

This dialogue gives you the option of choosing the size of the research description boxes on your profile page. Depending on the length of the content, the abstract and additional information may be reduced or even hidden.

The 4 options for how to display research on your profile

Manage Versions

It is possible to create a snapshot of your exposition, which you can restore later.

A snapshot is created by going to ☰ > versions and clicking add snapshot.

version dialog

When you restore a snapshot, the original is never overwritten, instead a new exposition, with a new id and urls, will be created from the snapshot. You can also use this property of snapshots to duplicate or clone an exposition.

There are three options for how to deal with the collaboration settings of a restored snapshot:

One can also restore as private and change the settings afterwards of course, through the collaboration and share menus.

Versions of Published Expositions

Published expositions cannot be changed in the RC (this is per definition, to allow referencing content within these expositions by other researchers), but duplicates can.

To get an editable duplicate of a published exposition one has to:

  1. make a snapshot of the published exposition.
  2. restore the snapshot.

This duplicate can now be edited, without the changes having effect on the original published exposition.

Edit Research

This dialog can be opened by ☰ > edit details or clicking the title of the exposition in the workspace editor. It allows you to edit metadata, collaborations with other users and the table of contents.

Edit research dialog, showing meta page

(*) = title and abstract are obligatory.

Author Pseudonym: by default an exposition always appears under the name of the user(s) that have edited it. The author pseudonym field allows you to customize what is displayed as author, for example if you are publishing an exposition as a group (ie “The Beatles”, “Monty Python”) or when representing somebody or something else. If an author pseudonym is provided, the author pseudonym will replace the authors names wherever the work is shown on RC (and in the DOI deposit, if the exposition is published).

Being Anonymous

Important: using a pseudonym does not make you fully anonymous, as the authors and co-authors will still be displayed in the metadata (contributors are not shown). The only way to be fully anonymous, is to request an ALIAS for your account as a whole. You can request an ALIAS by contacting: support@researchcatalogue.net. In this case, your own name will not be shown anywhere in public pages of the RC, however even with an ALIAS, SAR will still be able to indentify the user that created the exposition if there is copyright infringement or other illegal material.

Grouping

Default groupings: When you create a set or exposition the new objects will appear in default groupings (“Sets” and “Expositions”). If you are invited to one by another RC user, they will appear under “Expositions (collaborated)”.

Custom grouping: You can also create your own groupings. To add a new grouping click “add grouping” and enter the name of the grouping. You can sort your objects within a grouping, arrange the groupings themselves and move object between groups via drag and drop. Click and drag a grouping itself to change the order of the groups.

On the right-hand side of a grouping’s title, there are a series of icons displayed. Here you can edit and delete the grouping and control its public visibility (using the circle icon).

Only custom grouping can be deleted. If you have only one grouping containing content, its title will not be shown on your public profile. Empty groupings will also not be displayed on your public profile page.

Cleaning up Cluttered Profiles:

You can delete expositions you have created by clicking ☰ -> delete exposition. Expositions which are in review or published cannot be deleted. Please note that deleting an exposition is permanent.

If you are co-author, contributor or supervisor of an exposition, you can “leave collaboration” to remove the exposition from your profile.

You can open / close groupings by clicking the small triangle on the left of the grouping. You can also make the box of an exposition smaller by clicking ☰ -> change layout. It can also be easier to get an overview by using your browsers zoom (ctrl/cmd + ctrl/cmd -). You can return to default zoom level with ctrl/cmd 0.

Legacy

Add Work

Works are an older feature, which has now been replaced by media sets through the media repository. If you had created works previously, you can still edit or remove them.

Add Project

Projects were part of an external import of data, they are no longer available for users.

Media Repository

The media repository allows RC users to navigate, organize and manage their media. Each user can browse the media that is used in their expositions (the simple media) or collect media files and texts to be used in an exposition. Beyond organizing media, you can share it with other users of the RC. You can upload media, organize them into sets and share it with other users of the RC.

Media repository

Browsing

The media browser contains three tabs:

There are two ways of displaying the media or sets:

The filter can be used to only show certain types of media. You can filter by tags, keywords, date and media type.

Creating New Media

There are various ways to create new media:

Upload

Click “Upload media” to add a new file. Once you have select one or more files, you will be asked to provide at least copyright information. If you are the creator, you can fill in your own name here.

Accepted types:

Transcoding Audio and Video files:

The Media Repository accepts all common audio and video formats and will automatically convert them to web compatible format. Audio is transcoded to 256 kbps mp3, video to mp4 with the original resolution.

Multi-Upload

You can select multiple files to upload at once or a folder containing several files. You will be presented with a form block for each file.

Text

Text is a media type in the media repository.

You can also create snippets of text by using the “create text” button. You can select between three different types:

Metadata

Every album and media entry is linked to set of metadata that include copyright and licensing information as well as a title and the following fields:

Description

The description is not typically displayed for a reader of an exposition but allows the author to provide additional information.

Tags

Tags are meant for personal organization. Typical examples would be “todo”, “old”, “archive”, “new”, or “in progress”. They are private to your RC account, so no other users will see them.

Open Keywords

Open keywords are shared with the entire RC, any user can add any new term to the global namespace.

You can either search for existing open keywords or create your own, if the term has not been used before.

To prevent duplicates, the RC does not differentiate between upper and lower case, for example: “Art” and “art” are understood to be the same thing.

Closed Keywords

Closed keywords are part of a closed and controlled vocabulary administered and continuously extended by the RC. They are chosen so that we can more easily interact with other repositories. They cannot be extended by individual users.

License Picker

Please consult licenses.

Sets and Sharing

Media can be organized in sets. Once media is in a set, it will also become available in the block and graphic editors in the media tab, under sets.

You can create a new set by clicking “create set” button (located on top).

To add media to a set, open the set by clicking it, and click “select media”.

a media set

This will divide the screen in two rows. The first row is the media currently in the set, the right row is all your media. You can add a media to the set by clicking the plus.

a media set in selection mode

Tip: you can filter your media to only show a specific file type, date range or tag.

Media sets can be shared with other users and in portals. Click share to open the share form. There are three sections in this form:

 

Creating Expositions

You can start a new exposition from your profile page page, by clicking Create Exposition. You will need to provide a title, abstract and copyright as minimum. If you are the creator of an exposition, the copyright is typically your own name. All of these may be changed later.

If you do not see [ create exposition ], you may have to arrange a full account first.

Choosing an Editor

The Research Catalogue offers two general-purpose editors:

Users can combine both graphical and block pages in a single exposition.

And two aditional specialized formats (cannot be combined):

When creating a new exposition you are asked to choose which editor you want to start with. Graphical and block pages are part of the same format and can be mixed, but text and HTML are separate formats. This makes it important to choose the right format. Most beginners will want to use the block or graphical editor. For an overview of selected use cases, and how to make an informed decision on the editor choice, please visit this exposition.

Some portals will not accept HTML imported submissions. Please consult the portal beforehand, in case you are planning to submit and want to use the HTML import feature.

choosing a format in the Create Exposition dialog

Graphical Editor

The graphical editor, allows the author to set the position of each element in the page. This makes it easy to build rich graphical pages in which text and media, such as images, video and audio files, are freely positioned in a infinite canvas. However, due to their non-linear nature, graphical expositions are not “responsive”. If you want readers to be able to read your exposition on mobile devices, then either the block editor or the text-based editor might be more suitable for your project.

Block Editor

The block editor, uses the same tools and the drag-and-drop interface of the graphical editor, but positioning is relative. As a result, block pages are fully “responsive”. Instead of an absolute grid and an infinite canvas, the block editor uses a more newspaper-like rows-columns structure. It is suitable for editing pages that have a lot of “inline” content, where media is inserted between or beside blocks of text, or media has to be positioned in relation to certain elements in a text. It is less flexible for creating diagrams, maps, or for overlaying materials.

Text-Based Editor

The text-based editor allows creating blog-like pages through writing and editing text. Pages using the text-based editor cannot be combined with block or graphical editors. The editor is optimized for writing (and importing) texts, while still supporting the embedding of inline media.

You can structure and format the text using the commonly used Markdown notation. Content can be automatically imported and exported from and to various external formats, for example Word, Open Office and LateX documents. Styling can be customized extensively using standard CSS. Text-based expositions are responsive and thus mobile-friendly.

HTML Import

For even more customization, you can import a static HTML website as a whole. JavaScript is not supported.

Comparison of RC Exposition Formats

Graphic Block Text-based
non-linear linear linear
page can have any dimension vertical column with rows vertical column
static responsive responsive
slideshow, 3d-object, synchronized playback of different media limited to images, video, audio & pdf limited to images, video, audio & pdf
similar to Powerpoint or Dreamweaver similar to a structured blog post similar to a blog post
only editable in RC only editable in RC input is plain text, can be imported and exported to different formats
can have multiple pages can have multiple pages single page
position and tool-based links tool-based links table of content generated from headers
drag and drop, mouse based drag and drop, mouse based Expositions are written by typing
reviewers can leave comments and notes no commenting functionality no commenting functionality

Views

Preview

The preview is the final result that the reader will see when opening your exposition, for example through the exposition URL or when a user clicks “OPEN EXPOSITION” anywhere on the RC. All expositions have a navigation bar that shows if the user moves the mouse cursor to the top. It contains a table of contents, abstract and other information.

While you are editing your exposition in the workspace editor, the Preview button (, right top corner) shows what the page will look like to the reader. If you already have a preview tab open, the second time you click Preview, it will simply refresh, instead of opening a new tab.

Note: while for the reader the exposition will always open the entry page of your exposition, clicking the PREVIEW button in the editor shows the page that you currently are working on in your workspace. Thus, you can also PREVIEW pages that are not yet listed in the table of contents.

Workspace View

workspace view of the graphical exposition format

The workspace editor is the editor of content on the RC. It can be opened by clicking ☰ > edit workspace on an exposition listed on your profile. If you are reading one of your own expositions, you can also open the editor by clicking EDIT in the navigation bar on top. Which editor will show will depend on the format.

Published epositions cannot be edited (by definition) and you need to be the author, co-author or editor of an exposition to be able to edit an exposition.

Graphical Editor Mode

When you open the editor you will see math-paper like area in the center. This is called the grid. Content is added by dragging-and-dropping “tools” from the toolbar onto the grid. You can preview what the exposition looks like to the reader by clicking the “preview” button: This preview button is located at the top right.

The position of content in graphical expositions is determined by the author and is always absolute. This implies:

All of the above results in the graphical editor being most suitable for non-linear layouts. For simpler expositions, it can be worthwhile to consider using the block editor or the text based editor ( see choosing an editor ).

On the right you will find the content manager, consisting of four tabs:

Tab Function:
map map and list overview
media view previously uploaded media files
popup manage popovers
ref manage references / bibliography
pages manage pages

Adding Tools in Graphical Editing Mode

A tool is created by dragging the icon onto the canvas.

If you click a tool once, it will open the default setting dialog.

Tools can be resized by clicking and dragging the green borders with the mouse.

Tools can be rotated by clicking and dragging the yellow dot.

The size of the current weave will automatically grow when tools are added or dragged over the current limits.

You can right-click (🍎 -> cmd and click) a tool to see extra options.

Block Editing Mode

block editor

The block editor is an alternative method of creating exposition pages. It allows the author to use the same media tools as the graphical editor, but instead of exact positions, the page is built up using blocks.

Block-page content is organized using rows and columns. The main structure is a single stack of rows. Each row can either be a single block, or a custom division in columns.

An important aspect (and advantage) is that the height and vertical position will automatically fit the content: the bottom of the previous tool determines where the next one starts. The blocks are thus stitched together end to end, never overlapping. This means it easier to work with text content.

Using relative sizes like this is often associated with the concept of responsive web design.

When to use

The block editor is most suitable for:

The block editor is less suited for:

Certain tools (Sync, Shape) for example, can only be used in graphical pages, although more will become available in the future.

The block editor provides functionality similar to text-based editor (which is also responsive), but the difference is that you can more easily create horizontal rows of content and the editing is drag and drop, using the same tools as the graphic editor. This also means that both type of page can be used in a single exposition.

Basic Usage

You can choose the block editor when creating a new exposition or when creating a new page within an existing exposition.

A block page is organized as a list of boxes which are called rows. A row is created by clicking the black + at the bottom of the previous block.

creating a new column

You can then choose a column layout for this block:

column layout options

Within each row, you can have one or more columns of cells dividing the content in that row. You can think of it as a table, except that the number of columns is allowed to be different for each row. Within a column you can drag-and-drop any number of tools, although it is probably a good idea not too have too many in one column, since this will make it harder to change layout afterwards.

You can add tools by clicking the green “+” sign, or dragging them from the toolbar:

editing content
example rows and columns

The default is 1 column in the row, in which you are basically just editing a list of tools. When you create or drag and drop new tools in the column, they will be added to bottom of that column.

You can change the layout, move or delete the row by using the black controls on the right top:

column controls

Optional breaking point for smaller screens

On small screens, a high number of columns can become problematic. For these situations, you can set a breaking point. If the screen width is below this point, any multicolumn row will be displayed as a single column. The lower the breaking point, the more it will keep the rows unchanged (even on smaller screens).

The row settings dialog, showing the breaking point dropdown

Editing

You can move tools by dragging and dropping them from one cell to the other. Dropped tools will never replace tools, they will insert at the bottom of the current cell.

You can also move an entire row by dragging it from the “compass” icon visible at the top right corner of a row.

Hyperlink

It is possible to construct a hyperlink to a specific tool within a block page. To retrieve such a tool link, right click the tool and choose “copy tool link”. This will copy the tool url to your clipboard, so you can use it to create a hyperlink elsewere.

copy tool link in the context menu

Table of Contents

To link to a specific tool in your “CONTENTS” menu, open the menu “options”, choose “edit table of contents”. This will open a list of entries, where you can choose a page and a tool within your page to link to.

selecting a specific tool in the table of contents dialog

Viewing

On screens that are very narrow, the content will automatically break into a single list again, without objects next to each other.

Styling

You can globally control the styling of your page, through the page style dialog, available in your pages tab.

styling dialog

Tools for Text, Video, Image and Audio

Note: The tools are described as they work in the graphical editor. When using the block editor, some of the tools are not available or there may be limitations in tool options.

Context Menu

context menu location

The context menu of a tool is reached by clicking on the menu icon (see below), or right clicking (Apple: CTRL+click) inside a tool. The only exception is the text tool, see text tool.

context menu

Key Commands

There are a few useful key commands in the editor. Selected tools have a green border.

Key command: Action:
ctrl + c copy selected tools (*)
ctrl + v paste
⌘(Mac) + a or ctrl + a select all tools on current weave
⌘(Mac) + click or ctrl + click on object select multiple objects one by one
backspace, delete remove selected tools

* = Important: the object you copy, is duplicated at the moment you paste. This means that if you change an object after copying, the pasted object will also have these changes (!)

Defaults

Defaults for styling and options can be set for a tool, by clicking it in the toolbar.

Text Tool

Watch the video tutorial.

The text tool is designed for quickly adding text.

It has two states: when it is in active state you can change the text, if you click outside of the tool, you can move the tool and change its size. Double click inside of the tool to start editing the text again. Content is saved as soon as you exit the text editing state.

If you right-click the text tool, you can find some extra edit options under edit. You can also (while hovering over a text tool with your mouse) click the (☰) menu icon and choose edit.

In comparison to the HTML-tool, the text tool allows you to edit your text directly on the page. While the HTML-tool opens a new dialog window. If you need more styling options, or want change the HTML source code of text, use the HTML-tool. A text tool can be converted to an HTML-tool via the menu option convert to HTML tool.

Regarding the availability of typefaces/fonts please read fonts.

Mixing Images and Text

An important advice regarding text tools in the graphical editor is to keep them short. As a rule of thumb, keep the height below 1-2 screenheights maximum. Taller tools can result in positioning errors between the text content and other tools and text in your exposition.

The reason for this is that browsers are not identical when it comes to text-rendering, there are actually minute differences (a fragment of a pixel) that can add up and cause serious alignment issues if your tools are bigger. This risk is worsened by the fact that you as the author will not notice: because the magnitude of error is actually dependent on what browser your reader is using.

If you find your design requires taller text-tools with illustrations inline, use the specialized block editor instead, or split the text tools in smaller parts: proper way of combining text with other tools

Scrollbars

If the text within a text tool is longer than the tool height, a scrollbar will appear and part of the text is cutoff. Therefore (especially when copying from external editors) it is important to check that the tool has a large enough size (unless you specifically want a scrollbar).

Style

See style options.

Options

If a text is longer than its frame on the weave, a scrollbar is generated automatically. You can control the visibility of the scrollbar in options. The default setting is automatic. Be careful setting this to never: if a text tool is too small to display all the text, it will be impossible for the reader to see all the text.

History

See history.

HTML Tool

The HTML-tool is used for advanced text editing. It is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get rich text editor. Unlike the text tool, you can only edit its content in a dialog box.

Media

html tool media tab

Text is edited in the media tab. You can style your text using the buttons.

! important: If you copy-paste your text from Word, Pages, LibreOffice, Google Docs or any other text editor, note that not all fonts and styles will show the same on every computer. A safer practice is to import the text without any formatting, and format it within RC. This can be done either by exporting your text as plain text and copy pasting from that version, or importing your document using the document import

To enlarge the palette of text styling options, click on the first button, show/hide toolbars. Opening it will allow you to insert lists, enumerations, tables, citations. Regarding the availability of typefaces/fonts please read fonts.

Another commenly used feature is the hyperlink button (it looks like a chain link). This can be used to insert hyperlinks or footnotes into your text.

The top right button opens the editor in fullscreen. Note: you will have to exit full screen mode to submit your changes, using the same button.

html extended tool options

Anchors (Graphical/Block)

You can use the anchor button to insert standard HTML anchors to a specific location in your HTML tool. When creating a hyperlink to your anchor, do not forget to prefix it with a ‘#’. So if you anchor is called “anchor1”, the link should be to “#anchor1”.

Tips Using the HTML Tool:

Style

> See style options

Options

If a text is longer than its frame on the weave, a scrollbar is generated automatically. You can control the visibility of the scrollbar in options. The default setting is automatic. Be careful setting this to never: if a text tool is too small to display all the text, it will be impossible for the reader to see all the text.

Templates

If you want to reuse the content of an HTML-tool, you can create your own templates. This function can be found in the media tab. After finishing the edit of your template, click save as new template and give the template a name in the dialog box that appears. To load a template, click load template and choose one from the list in the dialog box.

Submit, Delete, Or Cancel

Finally, you need to exit the dialog window. If everything is the way you want it, choose submit and the text field will be loaded on the weave. To discard changes to the content, cancel the dialog box. If you want to delete the whole HTML field, including all content in it, click delete. Unintended deletions can be restored via commands – restore deleted tools.

Image Tool

Also known as the picture tool.

To add a picture, drag and drop the image icon from the tool palette onto the weave. As with all other tools, a pop-up dialog appears automatically and gives you the choice between “selecting” or “adding” an item.

You can upload image files in the following formats: jpg, png, tiff, gif, psd, tga, bmp. For uploading PDFs, please use the PDF-tool. At the moment, regardless of the format, the RC will convert the image to a PNG (a lossless format). It’s dimensions will be optimized to the specific use in the tool.

To add an item, choose “add” and upload the object from your desktop to the RC servers. Name the file and make a declaration of the copyright holder. Once an image is uploaded it is also automatically added to the simple media tab.

Style

> see style options

Options

There are options available to change how images are resized in relation to the green border containing the image. This is controlled by changing the size parameter, which can be set to:

You can also change the position within the border ie: top-left, right-bottom etc…

In settings you are able to lock the aspect ratio. And you can allow readers to enlarge the image by activating the checkbox “on click open image in popup.”.

If you want to use a picture as a hyperlink, paste a URL into the field on click open link.

You can also set a tooltip text (a text that shows when the user ‘hoovers’ his mouse over the picture) for the image. Set the show on hoover option to plain text and enter your text in the box below.

You can also make the tooltip display the copyright info, by setting the show on hoover option to copyright.

Please note, you can’t change the copyright information in the “edit picture” window. To change the name or the copyright text, close the current dialog and go to the item in simple media and click edit (also double click) to open the edit media dialog.

Audio Tool

> Audio tool tutorial

As with the other tools, use the audio tool by dragging and dropping the icon from the tool palette onto the weave. A pop-up dialog window appears automatically and gives you the choice between “selecting” or “adding” an item. Selecting is for previously uploaded media (either through other audio tools or the media manager). Adding allows you to upload a new file.

The following formats are supported: ogg, wav, mov, au, mp4 audio container formats; mp2, mp3, aac, pcm a-law, flac audio codec formats. All audio file formats will be transcoded to mp3s with 256kpbs.

Audio tool upload dialog

To minimize loading times for readers, audio files are automatically compressed. During the transcoding process, the name will be grayed out in the media list and a text will be shown in the preview.

RC encodes with a bitrate of 256 kB per second. For further information and technical questions see FAQ 2.6 or contact the RC User Support.

Style

> see style options

Options

The audio player has a number of settings:

As in the picture tool, if it is necessary to give textual information about the sound file, you can enter the text to be displayed when the mouse cursor hovers over the item.

Video Tool

Video tutorial

As with the other tools, you can use the video tool by dragging it from the tool bar and dropping it onto the weave or block.

In the dialog box that appears you have the possibility to add (i.e. upload) items from your computer or select items from the “simple media” or media sets.

If you choose “add media”, you will see the dialog below. This dialog contains both a preview and video field. The preview field, which controls the image that is shown before playback, is optional: if you only provide a video, the preview image will be generated from the first frame. You can later also select different images to function as a preview image. In that case, these images have to be part of your simple media or media sets.

Dialog for adding a new file

At the moment, the RC supports the following formats: avi, mov, mp4, mpg video container formats; dv1394, h.264, mpeg2, mpeg1, mjepeg video codec formats. Both VBR and CBR are supported.

The video tool currently supports resolutions up to 2048x1080. If the resolution is higher, transcoding will fail. Please keep this in mind while uploading videos shot on phones, which commonly provide up to 4k resolution.

All media will be compressed to a smaller size, this is called ‘transcoding’. This process takes time. During the ‘transcoding’ the file name is greyed out in your simple media. If you want, the RC can also sent you an email when transcoding has finished. You can find that option under profile, settings.

For further information and technical questions see FAQ or contact the RC User Support.

We highly recommend using smaller video files, for easier upload. If your file is extremely large, you may want to compress it before uploading using a program like Handbrake, FFMpeg or QuickTime (Mac).

Style

> see style options

Options

The video player has a number of options:

As in the picture tool, if it is necessary to provide textual information on the video file you can choose to display plain text or copyright information that will appear when the mouse cursor hovers over the item.

You can also use the play tool to synchronize selected video and audio tools.

Slideshow Tool

The slideshow tool allows you to create a gallery of images that can be displayed in a loop. You can choose to start the slideshow automatically and you can add an audio file to each picture of the slideshow.

Drag and drop the slideshow icon onto the weave and the dialog window will appear.

Open the slides tab to select the images. You can either upload an image from your disk, by clicking add media, or you can select images from your media repository sets and simple media clicking select media.

Each image can also be joined with an audio recording, which will be played in the background. Only audio files that have been previously uploaded to your simple media or media repository can be selected to be used as background. You can upload new audio files in your media list.

Style

> see style options

Options

In “options” you can define the position of the image within the frame. This is important when you are using images with different sizes and proportions. In settings it is possible to choose to loop the slideshow. If the loop option is enable, the slideshow will continue with the first slide once it reaches its last slide. You can choose to hide the navigation bar or give the reader the option to enlarge the picture with a click on the picture in your weave.

In automate you can set the autoplay options to:

When choosing autoplay you need to define the speed with which the slide will change. You can customise the duration of each slide (speed per slide) or let each slide change at the default speed.

As mentioned before, you can append audio files to each slide. Please note, you first have to upload the file into your simple media folder. In options, audio you can control the time of a crossfade (when one audio file fades out while a second fades in at a specified time). You can also choose the fade duration and the timeout of an audio file.

PDF Tool

The PDF tool gives you the possibility to add PDF documents containing texts, graphics or scores. By default the PDF is displayed as a small thumbnail showing a miniture of the first page. The reader of your exposition can load this PDF in a new tab by clicking the thumbnail. Alternatively, you can set the tool to display the PDF content directly embedded in the page (see options).

PDF is a suitable format for uploading (paper) based documents into your exposition. The limitation is that PDF files, by nature, only support static (printable) graphics and text, not video or audio. Although Abobe has started to support rich media embedding in their own PDF viewers, there is almost no support for this in other PDF viewers (like the one in browsers). In case text from a word processor needs to be combined with video and audio, use the HTML tool for the text and add the media separately using the other tools.

Uploading a pdf

After dragging the icon to the weave, a dialog will show.
Click the button ADD MEDIA to open the dialog for uploading a PDF.
Be sure to upload the PDF itself in the PDF field, not PREVIEW. One is also requested to add copyright information. When done, click submit and the file will begin uploading.

The pdf tool dialog

The PREVIEW field is for changing the image that represents the pdf in the exposition for the reader. If no preview image is provided, a miniturised copy of the first page will be used. You can later change the preview image, by selecting one from your media list.

Changing the PDF Preview Image

If you have an existing PDF tool, you can update the preview image with any image from your media list. If you want to use a completely new image, you will have to add it to your media list first.

A Few Notes

> see style options

Options

Sync Tool

this was previously sometimes referred to as the “play tool”

The Sync Tool is designed to synchronize the playback of selected video and audio tools on the same page. You connect one or more tools to the sync tool, and the tool itself is a button that allows the reader to start and stop playback of all connected tools at once, with one click. This can, for example, be used to document video installations with multiple screens and allows playing back synchronized combinations of musical voices and audio tracks.

Media

The Sync Tool itself functions as the start/stop button, but you have to upload your own icons or images in the tool’s Media tab to make it visible. One is for the “play” state, starting the playback. The other image represents stopping the playback (in all connected tools).

Options

In the options tab you can sellect which tools need to be connected to this Sync Tool. Only tools already present in the current weave may be selected. The option “pause other players when playing” will ensure that only the selected media files will be played back.

Shape Tool

(Not available in the block editor)

The Shape tool is designed for placing simple graphic elements such as arrows and lines in your exposition. You can generate forms to structure your layout or to help navigation. You can create rectangles, circles and lines. You can choose if they’re filled or not. You also have the possibility to specify the thickness of the frame and control the opacity of the elements. There are also four types of arrows (left, right, up, down). You can resize the elements on the weave by resizing the green frame displayed around the shape. By clicking and dragging the yellow point you can rotate an element.

Note Tool

(Not available in the block editor)

The note tool allows you to organize your work on RC, comment on sections, and communicate with co-authors. Drag the note icon from the tool-pallett onto the weave. You can write directly into the note without opening a new edit-window. Each note has a time-stamp which is generated when the note is placed on the weave.

It is possible to define who is responsible for the content (a change or revision, correction) of the note and you can set a date for resolving the issue described in the note.

Notes are visible on the preview as well. Please check, that all notes have been removed from the exposition when you intend to share or publish it.

Notes and User Roles

If an exposition is submitted to a portal the notes created by the different users involved (authors, portal admins, editor, reviewers) have different visibilities. Notes left by the author are visible to the admin and to the editor. Notes left by the reviewer are visible to the admin (though not the author or editor) and notes left to the editor are visible to the author and admin (though not to the review).

Text Style Options

You can use the buttons to directly add the basic stylings, eg. highlight it with bold or italic font or structure it with numerations or lists. You can change the font-family and increase or decrease the indentation. You can also insert links.

History

“History” provides a log of all changes that have been made to the tool. If you have unintentionally deleted a tool, you can restore it using “restore deleted tools” in the commands.

Embed tool

(Not available in the block editor)

The embed tool allows the integration of external content, such as videos or sounds, into RC expositions. Currently, the RC supports the following external content providers: Madek, Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and Sketchfab.

Embedding Risks

When considering embedding content from external sources, it’s essential to understand the potential risks involved. Here are some key points to consider:

Recommendation: To ensure the longevity and integrity of your content, it’s advisable to limit the use of external embedding, especially for key elements. Whenever possible, use internally hosted media or obtain the necessary permissions to host content directly in your exposition.

The embed tool can be used by pasting the link from the page you want to embed in the URL field and clicking submit twice. The first submit initiates the processing of the link. How to retrieve the correct embedding link depends on the service. The main URL visible when opening the media content that is to be embedded can be used by the RC for the above mentioned services. Please contact support if you have trouble or questions regarding the necessary URL.

Content from Youtube and Soundcloud can be used in the play tool and the playback can be synchronized with native RC tools.

Content from Madek needs to have been made publicly visible before embedding is possible. Please copy the sharing link from Madek into the URL field of the embed tool.

Important: Some RC-based journals/portals do not allow the use of externally hosted materials. If you are making an exposition to be published in such a portal, please check their policy first.

Style Options

the style tab of an html tool

The style tab allows you to set the way a tool looks on the outside. There are two ways of reaching the style tab:

For all tools except the simple text tool, one can also open style:

Click on the small “>” to open one of these sections:

The style tab only sets the external style of the tool, text markup is done within the text or html tools.

Tool Defaults

It is possible to change the default styling settings for any tool, by double clicking the tool in the toolbar. After the default is changed, every newly created tool will initially use these new settings.

History

The history tab gives you the posibility to change the content within the tool to an older version. The versions of a text object are created each time you have clicked outside it (and the three animated dots show inside). With the html tool, a version is created each time you click submit.

Content Manager / Editor Tab

The content manager is a collection of tabs located on the right side of the graphical & block editors. It is not present in the text-based editor.

map, media, references, popover and pages tabs

Map

You can use the overview to see all objects in the exposition as both a miniature map and a list. This can also be useful to retrieve lost objects, or change the ordering (front to back). If you click on a tool in the list, the editor will automatically jump to its location, you can also double click a tool to edit the content of that tool.

Media Tab

Media files can be found, uploaded, previewed and deleted in the “Media”-tab on the right hand side. There are subtabs: Simple Media, Sets and “+”, which allows the integration of external repositories, such as the Media Archive of the Arts of the ZHdK (Madek).

Simple Media

The simple media, which can be found within the “Media”-tab on right hand side of the editor. Images, videos, audio and other media that have been added in tools onto the canvas will automatically show up in simple media tab. You can click and drag files from the simple media tab onto your canvas in order to create tools.

You can also upload media here to use it as a background or preview image in tools like the video tool and the pdf tool.

The list of media files can be sorted by type, name, creation date and size and you can search for a file name by using the search field.

Files that are listed in gray are in the process of being transcoded.

There four buttons on top of the list of files, from left to right:

Simple media tab

Each media file can be provided with a license, see licenses. The licenses of all used media in an exposition are shown on the META page.

Sets

You can view the media sets you created in the Media Repository. You have to click on the set to open and view the media. Once opened, you can drag media onto your page. An icon will indicate if the set is shared to you by others.

Works

“Works” are an older feature similar to media sets, if you had created works in the past you will find them under sets as well.

Import Word documents using Simple Media

It is possible to upload Microsoft Word (.docx), Libre Office, Open Office (.odt) and LaTeX documents and have the content automatically turned into RC HTML tools and image tools. The RC uses pandoc for this.

To convert a document, open the Simple Media Tab and upload it in the “document” section of the upload dialog. It may take a few moments to convert after the upload has reached 100%.

media upload tab
upload doc dialog

Once converted, the document will show up as a folder within your simple media. You can drag the elements from this folder to a desired location in the exposition, resize and further adjust them. The document will be split whevever there is an image and the images will become available as image tools.

To ensure maximum compatibility with RC fonts and styling, text-editor specific styling is automatically filtered, but the inner structure of the text is maintained. This includes: paragraphs, headers, bold, italics, footnotes, illustrations & tables. Footnotes are also converted into RC Footnotes/Popovers.

If you want to reproduce the feel of a text document in your RC exposition, it is best to use the block editor. When importing word content in the graphical editor, please be careful with long text tools (which may cause issues).

Important Note Regarding Styling:

By default, RC has zero margin on all paragraphs, this will mean that there is no whitespace between paragraphs. To avoid this issue, I recommend adding the following style to your raw CSS settings of your page where you import word content. You can edit the “raw css” of a page by opening pages tab > ✎ edit settings > style > raw css.

#container-weave .html-text-editor-content p {
    margin: 1em 0; /* set top and bottom margin to 1 */ }

#container-editor .html-text-editor-content p {
    margin: 1em 0; /* do the same for the editor */ }

This makes sure paragraph margins are displayed correctly.

Pages

Pages are managed in the pages tab of the content manager. An RC exposition can consist of one or more pages. A new exposition starts with a single page, called “default page”.

page tab

Creating a Page

New pages are by default private, they have to be explicitely added to the table of content to be visible (or by making a hyperlink to the page in your own content). The order of pages cannot be changed in the pages list, but this can be done in the table of contents. The exposition page will automatically change size based on the content.

Entry page

One can change the first page visible to the reader by changing the entry page. Go to the menu options and choose edit meta data. Scroll down to “entry page” (at the bottom of the dialog) and select the page you want as your start page for the reader.

Page Settings

[the page settings dialog](images/pages-tab-2018.png ” the page settings”)]

In the page settings dialog, you can change the meta data of the page and control the page appearance. It is opened by clicking the pencil button in the bar.

Page Settings - Metadata

Page Settings - Style

Here one can change:

Raw CSS

You can set user defined CSS rules that are applied to the page or the exposition as a whole. Cascading Style Sheets are the standard way of styling HTML documents. Although a lot of styling can be directly edited through the style tab, it can sometimes be useful to specify your own CSS.

The CSS class for HTML tools is:

.html-text-editor-content {
/* put your styles here */
}

To style text within a simple text tool you have to use:

.tool-simpletext .tool-content * {
/* put your style here */   
}

Supplying Your own Fonts

You can include your own external fonts through CSS @import statements. Be aware that many (also fonts like “Arial”), cannot be self-hosted unless you have a license that allows that. Google Fonts has an overview of fonts that you can freely use. Here is an example of using the “Roboto” font:

@import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Roboto:ital@1&display=swap');

.html-text-editor-content * {
    font-family: roboto;
}

.tool-simpletext .tool-content * {
    font-family: roboto;
}

Line-Height

There is no way to control line height within the HTML or text tool, but you can change it using CSS:

.html-text-editor-content * {
    line-height: 2em;
}

.tool-simpletext .tool-content * {
    line-height: 2em;
}

“em” is a relative size unit, it measures the line-height ratio from the size of the ‘m’ character in the font.

Be aware that changing the CSS

Deleting a Page

The page can be deleted by clicking the trashcan icon next to the page title. Deleted pages cannot be recovered. Of course, if you want to make a page invisible to the reader it may be prefered to just remove it from the table of content.

Popovers

Popovers are footnotes that pop up. They provide a way to present additional content in your graphical and block pages without cluttering the page. The popover appears when the reader clicks/hoovers over the popovers’ activation hyperlink. Instead of as hyperlink within text, you can also make them show up on hoovering a particular image tool.

what a popover looks like

The content of a popup is edited in the same way as graphical pages.

Naming: Inside of the RC, Popovers may still be refered to as Footnotes in certain places: there is no difference in functionality.

A common use for Popovers was to make bibliographical references that pop up in the text. however, the RC also has a dedicated reference feature for that now, that will also generate a bibliographical list on the metadata page.

Creating a Popover

Popovers can be created in two ways:

  1. As a hyperlink within text tools
  2. Linked to an image tool

To create a popover within a text tool, open a Text or HTML tool and select a piece of text. After this, click the hyperlink button insert hyperlink, this will open a dialog:

image of insert link/footnote dialog

Now choose the second tab “footnote” to create a new popover.

To link a popover to an image tool, right click the image tool and select “add footnote”.

Customizing the Popover Properties

Selecting text as a footnote link

You can customize the popover by setting the following properties:

Editing a Popover

All popovers are listed in the “Popups” tab on the right hand side. If you click one, the RC will automatically scroll to it’s reference in the text or image tool.

List of popovers

The list has the following actions:

Icon Function
open popover workspace opens the popover workspace editor where you can edit thecontent of the popover
edit settings opens a window which allows editing the title, size, and styling of the footnote.
open popover workspace delete a footnote

Within the popover editor, you can resize it by dragging its corner.

“simple text” popovers are in fact automatically generated normal popovers with your text inserted in a text tool. This has consequences if you want to adjust the size of a “simple text” popover as a whole, since you would also need to change the size of the tool within that popover after resizing. To edit a “simple text” popover internal tools, simply double click it in the popover list.

Changing the Position or Display Settings of a Footnote

If you need to change the screen position or display settings of an existing footnote, the best way is:

  1. Go to the Footnote tab.
  2. Click the footnote you want to change.
  3. Click Edit Settings (“pen”) icon.
  4. Go to the options tab.

Auto-Numbered Footnotes

Instead of using text as footnote links it is also possible to use numbered links. The numbers will be filled in and adjusted automatically. In order to create auto-numbered footnotes create a footnote in the text or HTML tool as described above but without selecting any text. An “x” will be inserted where the cursor is placed. This “x” will be replaced by the correct number when the text is displayed.

Auto-numbered footnote in the editor

The numbering starts at 1 and encompasses all text and HTML objects on the weave. Numbering is performed by object and proceeds from the top and left to the bottom and right of the page.

Be aware that automatic numbering does not depend on creation order, it only depends on x and y position of the tools. This means that if the notes (1,2,3 etc..) are in a vertical column, for example:

Footnote numbering in correctly vertically-aligned tools

When the tools are lined up like this, footnotes are correctly numbered. However, if one of the text tools containing an automatic footnote in a column is just a bit (even 1 pixel) to the left, like so (exaggeration):

Incorrect auto-numbering in non-aligned tools

Then RC will automatically number the notes in 2 first, then 1, then 3. In this case, it is very important to have the text tools exactly at the same x position (through right click -> style tab you can check this most easily).

Pictures

It is also possible to use images as links to footnotes. When clicking on the image or moving over it with the mouse cursor the popover will be show. In order to use an image as a footnote click the menu icon on the bottom right of the image (or right click the image) in order to open the context menu. Click the item “add footnote” from the context menu and fill in the appearing dialog window.

References

The reference feature allows you to build a bibliography for your exposition. It is available for both graphical and block pages.

Creating a Reference

You can create a new reference by going to the Ref tab, which is located on the right-hand side of the workspace editor. Click the + button to create a new reference. A dialog will open with a form to enter the reference data.

create reference

Alternatively you can also import references from external managers (for example: Zotero, Menderley & Jabref). The format used is BibTeX. You can also import multiple reference items in one go.

The RC currently supports the following reference types:

Each item will have different fields. Fields marked with * are required. In case none of the types fit, you may choose to use Misc, which stands for miscellaneous.

create reference dialog

In the HTML tool, there is a button which allows you to insert a direct link to a reference in your bibliography. The reference will both show on hover and when the user clicks, one can view the full bibliography.

insert a reference in HTML tool

By default, this type of link is constructed from the last name of the first author and the year. You can customize the text of the link by selecting it and typing over it, for example to include a page number. The links will use the default hyperlink color, that can be customized in the Page settings page.

Viewing the References

References are listen on the META page of an expostion, at the bottom.

Table of Content

See the video tutorial on this topic.

an example of a contents list, made through the table of content

The table of content is designed to facilitate the navigation through an exposition. Both pages and locations within a page can be added in the table of content. In order to edit the table of content, go to the “Options” menu > “Edit Table of Content”.

Table of content dialog

To make a new entry, click on the index number and select the page (or “weave”) from the drop down menu and click submit.

There are two optional fields:

Tip: you can easily reorder the table of contents entries by clicking and dragging the boxes.

Static Navigation Bar

At the bottom of the table of content dialog, there is an option static menu bar to display the navigation bar continuously (instead of automatically hiding it).

TOC Alignment

Choose whether the links in the content menu should be displayed horizontally or vertically.

Hyperlinking

See the video tutorial on this topic.

It is possible to create hyperlinks between pages (or “weaves”) of an exposition and within a single page. This process has two steps: First fetch the link and then create the hyperlink.

In order to fetch a link to a different page within your exposition:

  1. Open the page you want to link to in the editor (through the page tab on the right hand side).

  2. (optional) scroll the page to the position where you want the link to point to.

  3. Right click any tool you want to link to and click “copy tool link”.

    context menu showing the copy tool link command

In the graphical editor it is also possible to create a link that points to your current (absolute) position in the editor. To fetch such a “position link”, use the menu options > show current position and copy the url.

To use the hyperlink in your text:

  1. Create or open a Text or HTML tool and select a word or sentence that should become the link.
  2. Now click the hyperlink button (it looks like a chain link) and a dialog will be displayed. location of the hyperlink button in text tool location of the hyperlink button in the html tool
  3. Paste the link in the link URL field and click add link.

Optionally you can change the target property, to have the link open in a new window. Note that if you have not selected any text, the link dialog will not offer a hyperlink option.

Hyperlink dialog window

Dialog Options:

Within the hyperlink dialog there are a couple of options:

Overview

Within the “Overview” tab on the right-hand side of the editor there is a checkbox labeled “Overview.” Clicking the checkbox will open and close a tab on the right-hand side of the editor. It contains both a map and a list of all objects in the exposition.

The overview map outlines all tools on the page, their size and position. By moving the red rectangle, one can jump to a specific position on the page.

Below the overview map, there is a list of all objects. If you click one of these tools, you go directly to that tool’s location. This can also be very useful when trying to find tools that have somehow become hidden, for example if another tool has been placed on top.

Other Menus

Edit Menu

the edit menu

Trivial copy paste functions:

Order functions:

These options change the order of objects if they overlap. Order can be important if you have tools with controls: for example, an audio player that is behind a text tool would need to be in front to allow the user to click the play button on it.

Locking:

Locking an object means it cannot be changed or moved in any way (until it is unlocked). This feature can also be used if only part of the exposition is to be moved (by locking the objects you do not want to move).

Arrange Menu

These functions help with aligning (two or more) tools. To select multiple tools, click them one by one while holding ctrl/cmd key, then choose the function you want to apply from the arrange menu.

(!) Be careful when applying changes to many tools at once on a complex weave. The changes in position are not reversable (unless you copied the tools before).

Options Menu

options menu

Edit Metadata

Here you can edit the Title, Abstract and Entry Page of the exposition.

Show Tool Borders

When this option is turned on, you will be able to see all borders of all tools (green dashed line) in the editor. This can be helpful searching for empty tools.

Edit Table of Content

Here you can set the contents of the “contents menu” that the reader uses to navigate between pages and position in your exposition.

See table of content.

Grid Options

Objects will only move in grid-size steps

Show/hide the grid

Change the size of the grid

Set Default Position

Change the initial position that the reader starts at in the weave, to the current location of the editor view.

Show Current Position

This provides the X,Y offset of the editor and a position link. X,Y can be used in the Table of content. The position link in Hyperlinking, or simply to share a specific position through a position link.

Restore Deleted Tools

Restore recently deleted tools. Currently, this option is only available in the graphical editor mode.

Restore Deleted Footnotes

Restore recently deleted footnotes. Currently, this option is only available in the graphical editor mode.

Help Menu

Get help!

Send Collaboration Message

When you are collaborating on an exposition, you can use the command “send collaboration message” to communicate with your collaborators.

Fonts

The research catalogue currently provides the following fonts:

Sans-serif:

Serif:

Monospace:

fonts overview

If you have an older exposition (created before April, 2022), you will also be able to select additional fonts. The reason for this is that Research Catalogue used to allow users to select these in the past. A majority of these fonts were only available in Windows and/or MacOS. The licensing around these proprietory fonts prevented Research Catalogue from self-hosting them. When a font was not available locally, the browser would switch to an alternative and this resulted in smaller or bigger visual differences and a warning message to the user.

The current solution to this problem is that Research Catalogue now provides a set of fonts that we can host ourselves. This guarentees that a font chosen in the text & html tools can never be missing. To ease the switch, we have included replacements that are designed to closely match the common fonts like Arial, Calibri and Helvetica and Impact. Older expositions will keep their current fonts but allow you to also use the new ones. Published expositions expositions cannot be changed, but you can create a new version of the exposition.

Migration of fonts in your expositions

In existing expositions (that have not been published), you can replace all current fonts to using the RC-safe set. One way would be to do this by hand, but for convenience we also provide an automatic option.

If you have a simple exposition, it is recommended to first do some small test switching the font in a selection of tools within your exposition by hand. If you like the result, you can then use the migration option, which can be found in the menu: Options > Edit metadata > compatibility. Due to technical limitations, this option is not available if the exposition is “in revision” or “in review”. If you want to apply the font migration to an exposition in such state, please follow the instructions “Safely trying a migration” below.

The font compatibility dialog will automatically detect which fonts are used in your exposition. You will then be asked to select a replacement font for each one.

Safely trying a migration:

If you have a very complex exposition with many tools, we highly recommend to first try the font migration on a copy instead of the original exposition (!). You can make a copy by:

  1. go to your profile page
  2. click the ☰ -> “manage versions” option on the exposition
  3. create a snapshot
  4. restore the snapshot, this will appear as a separate exposition on your profile.
  5. open ☰ -> edit workspace, and go to options > Edit metadata > compatibility to apply the migration.

If you do not like the result, you can just delete the exposition and start at step 1.

Text Based Editor

First time user of the text editor? click here.

Overview

Click any element in the image to jump to the relevant section:

Upload media files Import external format (Word docx, Open office odt, Plain txt) Editor (using Markdown) (Live) preview of the exposition Export to other formats (Pdf, odt, docx etc.) Media list (edit metadata/display) Style tab Markdown Toolbar Help / Preview / Profile / Logout Saving

Introduction

The text-based editor is aimed at creating responsive RC expositions. Despite the “text” in the name, expositions made with this editor can also contain images, video, audio or PDF. “Text based” refers to the method of editing: through plain text.

Because of this plain text input, text-based expositions can be easily imported or edited in external editors. The consequence is that editing the visual layout is less direct as in the graphical based editor. The structure of the exposition is expressed by using Markdown, the display of which can be customized through style sheets (css).

On desktop, the editor splits the screen in two: you can write your text on the left side editor while the result is shown as a preview on the right hand side. It is also possible to import the text from external formats like Word and Open Office. Formatting (bold,italic etc…) is added using markdown notation.

If you want to insert media, you can add these through the “upload media” button . When the upload has finished, the media edit dialog will automatically open, allowing you to edit and insert it.

Finally, the look of your text and media can be controlled through the media list and the style editor.

Creation and Using a Template

To create a text-based exposition, go to “my profile” and click create exposition, then select “text-based” for the editor type. Additionally, you can select a template, which will mean your new exposition will be pre-filled with the stylesheet and, depending on the template, some placeholder text.

Because the text-based and graphical formats are completely different, you can only change the editor type the moment you create a new exposition.

Portal admins can select any of their own expositions to become a template for their portal users, by going to the “template” tab in their portal settings.

Editor

The left hand side is where you can edit your text. The editor uses Markdown, which is a lightweight, human-friendly markup language. Because Markdown is expressed as plain text, you cannot directly change the styling of the text (font-size, color etc.. are edited in style ), but you can express the structure/markup of your text. See Markdown for a brief overview.

By default the editor uses colors to show the Markdown elements in your text, but you can also choose “plain txt” which allows your browsers spellchecker to work. 1.

Pages / Table of Contents

The text based editor is limited to single page articles. Headers marked with # will be included in the “contents” menu automatically.

Previews

Here you can see a preview of your exposition.

Because text based expositions are responsive (react to the size of the window), the result may change based on the width of the screen. For a full view preview, use the eye button in the toolbar.

Upload Media

To add new media, click upload media. After the upload finishes, the media edit dialog opens. This allow you to edit its metadata, size and to insert the media at the current cursor position.

If you want to insert previously used media, you can use the “media button” in the toolbar.

Media List

All media that you uploaded will appear in the “media list”, where they can be edited or deleted.

[The media list](images/media-list-elm.png ” media list”)

Editing Media

From within the media-list, if you click [edit], you will be able to change the name, metadata and display of a media file.

[The media edit dialog](images/edit-media-elm.png ” the edit media dialog”)

Insert Media

Media is represented on the editor side using a !{media-name} tag. The easiest way of inserting such a media tag is throught the insert media toolbar button, which shows a list of available media that can be inserted. Double click any item to insert.

inserting media using the insert button

You can also write the media tags directly, for example: to insert a media named “myFile”, you can directly write !{myFile}. This !{myFile} tag will be the location in your text where myFile will be inserted.

A caption text can also be included, to get a caption you write [my caption text]{myFile}. The caption text is displayed underneath the media.

Import & Export

You can import content from documents from text editors like Word (.docx), Libre/Open Office (.odt), HTML and several other formats. Not all styling is supported but images, footnotes, tables and most other structural features of the text are. Best results will be achieved if the document that is imported has a simple structure. When you import a a document, it will not replace the current content, but be appended at the end of your page.

Edit Style

Text based expositions are styled using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which is a standard way of styling web documents. The CSS of an exposition can be edited by going to the style tab. If you are not familiar with CSS, there is a good introduction here: https://www.w3schools.com/css/.

The structure of inserted media is as follows. You can use the outside class (rc-media-123455) to style an individual media element.

    <div class="rcobject small [rcimage/rcpdf/rcvideo/rcaudio]rc-media-[media id]"> 
        <figure id="media-1"> <img src="...">
            <figcaption> Caption text, which is taken from the tag -> ![captiontext]{media1} 
            </figcaption> 
        </figure> 
    </div>

Most templates will provide some basic formatting already, that you can adjust to your needs.

Toolbar

From left to right:

Markdown

Markdown is a human-friendly way of writing HTML webpages without using code. Markdown is written as plain text (like you would write on a typewriter), that is translated into HTML for you.

By surrounding your words with a few special characters you can inform markdown which styling you want it to use.

For example:
italic = *italic*
bold = __bold__

Instead of typing these characters, you can also select a piece of text and push the desired style button on top of the editor. This will insert the correct Markdown notation for you.

Paragraphs and Newlines

Single newlines are ignored by Markdown, unless:

Below are some examples to illustrate the behaviour. In the input the position of newlines is shown with ⏎.

A single newline character is ignored (!)

input: 
This text will⏎
be joined together

results in:

This text will be joined together

An empty line will start a new paragraph

If you create an empty line, by hitting enter twice ( ⏎⏎ ) , it will create a new paragraph in the output.

input:

a paragraph some text and some other
text. a paragraph some text and some other
text. a paragraph some text and some other
text. a paragraph some text and some other
a paragraph some text and some other text⏎
⏎
Another paragraph with some text. Another 
paragraph with some text. Another paragraph 
with some text. Another paragraph with some 
text. Another paragraph with some text.⏎ 
⏎

results in:

a paragraph some text and some other text. a paragraph some text and some other text. a paragraph some text and some other text. a paragraph some text and some other a paragraph some text and some other text text

Another paragraph with some text. Another paragraph with some text. Another paragraph with some text. Another paragraph with some text. Another paragraph with some text.

Two spaces at the end of your line will retain the newline:

input:

This line has two spaces at the end  ⏎  
and it thus keeps the
newline.

results in:

This line has two spaces at the end
and it thus keeps the newline.

A newline can also be created by ending the line with a “\”:

input:

The same for the backslash\⏎
also does the trick!

results in:

The same for the backslash 
also does the trick!

Headers

Headers are defined by using one or more "#" in front of the header name:

# header 1
## header 2
### header 3

There are six levels of headers. Header level 1, 2 and 3 (#,##,###) are automatically included in the contents menu, for easy navigation for the reader.

An alternative way of writing headers is by putting ===== or — below you header text.

Header 1
========

Header 2
----------

Lists

To get a bullet point list, write * before each item. Before the first item, keep an empty line. Thus, when you write:

* my first point
* another throught
* yet another thought

it will result in

To get ordered lists, write a number and a point, 1. , 2. , 3.

1. one
2. two
3. three

Hyperlinks are written in the following manner: [linktext](http://example.com)
which results in:
linktext

You can also use create internal links, called anchors. The link is made by writing a hashtag (#) before the name of your anchor:

[link](#your-anchor-id)

note the ‘#’, without this it will not work!

The anchor (or bookmark) itself is created like this:

<a id="your-anchor-id"></a>

Text-based Footnotes

The easiest way of inserting a footnote is using the footnote button: [ * ]. Footnotes consist of two parts, the reference, written like so:

[^1]

Then you define the footnote content at the bottom of your text with:

[^1]: This is my footnote.

The footnote content is automatically moved to the bottom of the resulting text.

Tip: the footnote identifier, does not have to be a number. You can also use names like ([^fn1] or [^myfootnote] etc..)

Quotation

A quotation is inserted by indenting your text with 4 spaces or 1 tab, like so: 
 ` quotation` ` more quotation`

Quotations are not automatically formatted (they keep their newlines).

Markdown Tables

Tables are written like this:

| Name | Age | Species |
|---------|-----|---------|
| Harry | 23 | Human |
| Gerhard | 77 | Parrot |
| Judith | 6 | Cat |
Name Age Species
Harry 23 Human
Gerhard 77 Parrot
Judith 6 Cat

You may also use HTML tables. There are also online tools that help you generate either of these

HTML Import

It is possible to import a website of static HTML into the RC. This feature is aimed at users that are familiar with HTML and want to use their own editor.

For security reasons, JavaScript is not supported, but CSS files, <img> <video> <audio> tags can be used. The folder containing your HTML and media files are to be uploaded as a single zip file (.zip). The maximum filesize is 10Gb, although for practical reasons it is probably more convenient to stay well below this.

Important: at this moment, the existing RC Journals do not accept submissions imported as HTML, because they do not fit in existing reviewing/editing workflows. If you are planning to submit your exposition to one of the journals in the RC, one should use the graphical or the text-based editor.

To create a HTML based exposition:

  1. Click [ Create Exposition ] on your profile page.
  2. Select “html based” as the editor, fill in required metadata fields and click submit.
selecting html import editor
  1. You will now enter an upload screen, where you can select your zip.
the upload screen

  1. Wait for upload to finish

    When the upload finished and there is no error, you can view the exposition by clicking the preview button (eye in the top right corner). If it is not succesful you can use the error message to see what changes you may need to make and try again.

Requirements for HTML Expositions

There are a few requirements to the zip that is uploaded:

Character Encoding

The character encoding of the .html files should be UTF-8. You should specify the character encoding first (before <title>), for example like so:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>my exposition</title>
</head>
<body>
etc...

Example Exposition

An example HTML-based exposition for use in the RC can be found on Github:

source: https://github.com/SocietyForArtisticResearch/rc-html-import-example

as zip: https://github.com/SocietyForArtisticResearch/rc-html-import-example/blob/master/DemoExposition.zip

Updating

Currently, it is not possible to update single files within your uploaded exposition. When something changes, you will have to upload the whole exposition again.

Collaboration, Sharing and Publication

By default, expositions are private: only visible to your account. These are the three options to make something visible to others:

An important feature of publication in the RC, is that it is permanent. This means that once an exposition is published, content will be locked forever. The idea behind this is that the content of published expositions can be safely referenced by others without risk of linking to something that has changed or disappeared.

Collaborating on Research

The Research Catalogue allows you to work together on a research exposition with one or more users. This is called collaboration.

There are 3 types of collaborators:

The owner role

Every exposition has exactly one owner. The owner is one of the author(s), and has some extra capabilities:

The owner can also select one of the other authors to be the owner. Be aware that this will remove the privileges from the previous owner.

Adding a Collaborator

An author of an exposition can invite collaborators through the collaboration tab of the exposition: click the menu icon (1) and ‘edit details’ (2) next to the research on your profile. If you are already in the workspace editor, you can also use options > edit details to open the same menu.

Location of the collaboration dialog

Choose ‘collaboration’, search for the user you want to cooperate with and add the collaborator by clicking on their name. Only users with full accounts can be collaborated with, and limited accounts will not show up if you try to find them.

Inviting a supervisor by typing it into the supervisor box

The users that were added will show up as a list below the field. After clicking submit, collaborators will receive an invitation from you in their collaboration page.

Accepting a Collaboration Invitation

You can find all collaboration invitations under https://www.researchcatalogue.net/collaboration/list. At the bottom of the list of invitations, you can find the backlog. In the backlog you can easily find all your past collaboration interactions, including links to the expositons & groups that you have been invited to. If you have “collaboration” notifications switched on in your profile settings, you will also recieve an email when somebody invites you.

Collaboration page

Removing a Collaborator

If you want to remove a collaborator, click the “x” behind their name in the field they were added.

Collaboration tab

Note: If a user’s name in the list is enclosed in brackets ( [ name ] ), it means that the invitation is sent successfully, but has not been yet accepted by the receiver.

Realtime Collaboration

For pages created with the graphical editor, you will see the edits of the others directly as they are made, in the other editors (block, html or text-based) you will have to refresh your browser tab to see changes. When a tool is being edited by another user, it will get a blue border. When a page is being edited by another user, it will be highlighted in blue.

Communication with Collaborators

While collaborating on an exposition, there are several ways of communicating with each other:

Instead of collaborating with RC users you can also publish an exposition or share share it with groups of people. The difference is when an exposition is shared, content can still be changed, and the mode of sharing can be changed at a later point.

Share

Share option can used to control visibility of works and expositions for groups of people. By default, your expositions are private, changing the mode allows others to see your work. Unlike publishing, you will still be able to change the content of an exposition when it is shared. Share settings can not be changed while the exposition is in review.

The share option can be found under the object menu (hamburger menu icon) of each object on your profile.

sharing menu dialog

There are four modes of sharing:

Independent of the above choices there is a check box:

share link option

link share : “When enabled, the object is accessible…” The exposition is accessible through the link displayed next to it, which is not shown anywhere else. This is useful for sharing with readers without an RC account, by turning the option on and mailing them the link.

Tip: Do not forget to submit the form, as the secret link will become active after submitting the form.

Link share can be combined with any of the other sharing modes (private, RC users, limited to portal, public). An exposition can for example be shared within a portal but simultaneously be accessible to some other people through the “secret” link.

Publication

Publication, is permanent. This means that once an exposition is published, all content will be locked. The idea behind this is that the content of published expositions can be safely referenced by others without risk of linking to something that has changed or disappeared. You can self-publish an exposition, or request publication with one of the portals. Please consult the portal pages: (institutions or journals) to see what requirements there are for publication there.

Self-Publish

Self-publishing makes an exposition no longer editable and publicly visible. On publication you will get a (free) DOI. By design, publishing an exposition is not reversible (so others can use the exposition link as a reference).

Submit for Review

Expositions can also be submitted to portals (such as journals) for review and publication. Most of the institutional portals will only accept requests from within the institution that is associated with it. In case you want to submit to an institutional portal, be sure to check their instructions regarding submissions: (institutions or journals).

To request review within a portal, click ☰ -> submit for review. You will be prompted to select to which portal you want to submit. After submitting, the exposition will show “in review” status.

While the exposition is “in review” state it can no longer be edited. The portal admin or editor will contact you regarding the reviewing process. The portal admin can unlock the exposition by putting it “in revision”, or rejecting the publication request. In the first case you or the admin can lock it again, in the second case you will have to resubmit it using the normal method.

After the portal admin accepts the publication request, you will receive a message and the content of the exposition will be premanently locked.

Submitting collaborated expositions

Expositions can only be submitted by the main author or owner of the exposition. So a co-author or contributor cannot submit an exposition for review. See owner.

Connect to Portal

A shared exposition can be connected to a portal. Connecting shared exposition will result in the exposition being listed on the portal page, without locking the content. The important difference with publication is, that connected expositions can still be changed after the connection has been made.

To connect an exposition, the main author will have to use the ☰ -> “connect to” option to request connection.

There are two conditions that need to be met before a request can be made:

The portal admin will receive a notification and has to confirm the connection (portal-admin documentation).

Once the connection has been approved by the portal admin, the connection will be shown in the expositions metadata and the exposition may appear on the portal page and portal feeds. Connected works may for example accompany a published exposition or represent a connected event. They have to be at least shared within the portal.

Groups

example group page

Groups are a way of having a shared space for expositions with multiple users, for example for use in a class, research project or workshop. As a member of the group, you get access to the group’s overview page, which shows all users and expositions connected to the group as well as general information. As a member, you can create (your own) expositions within the group, that will be directly visible to all the group’s members.

The group may also have one or more group admins (administrators). The groups’s admins have the ability to manage the groups’ members, expositions and edit the description and other metadata. They can also set collaborations for the expositions that are connected to the group. In some sense the group is a sub-portal within the portal.

The group’s visibility to the outside world can be controlled:

Groups are always created by the portal admin(s). The public groups of a portal can be found on the portal feed page. Private groups of which you are a member appear on your profile page.

Using the Group as a Member

There are two ways to become a member of a group:

  1. The group’s admin invites you. You can accept the request in the collaboration section.
  2. You visit a public group page and request membership. In this case the admin will have to accept you before you get access.

Only a full user account can become part of a group. Once you are a member you can [visit the group] from your own profile page. If you want to create an exposition within the group, you can do so by clicking the “create exposition” button on the groups page. Alternatively, you can request one of your expositions to be connected to the group. To do this, scroll to the exposition on your profile, click ☰ -> “Connect to” menu. Note: you can only request a exposition to be connected to the groups of which you are a member.

While an exposition is part of a group, it will be visible to all group members and group admins, even if it is otherwise private. The exposition can be removed by the groupadmin if it should no longer be part of the group, through managing connections, at which point it will no longer be accessible by the group members.

Roles within Groups

There are two roles within the group:

  1. Members (as described in the previous section):
    • Can view the project page and all expositions within it.
    • Can create expositions within the group.
    • Can send a request to connect a exposition from them to a project.
  2. Admins:
    • Can view the project page and all expositions within it.
    • Invite other users to the group.
    • Accept/reject exposition connection requests.
    • Change visibility of the group.

A group can have any number of admins/members. Users can request membership to a group by visiting the group page and click “request to become a member”.

Admins will be notified when a connection has been requested, or when a user indicated they want to become member of the group. The exposition connections can be accepted within the connections page of the Group. You can access this on the group’s page and clicking manage connections.

location of managing connections

When an admin invites a user to become admin or member, the invited user will have to confirm membership first in collaboration.

Group Visibility

The group’s page visibility can be changed by the group admin or portal admin.

Expositions connected to the group can be seen by all members, even if they are otherwise private.

The visibility of expositions is not modified for any user outside of the group: if a private exposition is connected to a public group for example the exposition will remain private to the outside world and only visible to the group members.

An exposition can be disconnected by the group admin, at this point it will no longer be accessible for the group members.

Admin Role, Managing Group Information and Members

A group page has a title, description, status, preview image and member list. Group pages can be found on the portal feed page or on your profile. When you are admin of the group, you can change the metadata by clicking edit details on the group page.

Creating a Group

A group can be created, removed and edited by the portal admin under the group header in the administration interface: admin-groups.

Portal Admin Guide

This portal admin guide consists of two parts:

  1. A tutorial for new portal admins
  2. Reference manual of all adminstration pages in more detail

Tutorial for new portal admins

What is a Portal?

A portal allows institutions to organize, display, and share their research outputs and projects, in a dedicated section within the Research Catalogue.

An important property of a portal is that it is autonomous: it is the portal institution that decides which research it wants to make visible in it, not SAR. Institutions may use the portal’s reviewing functionality to conduct their own review procedure for publications. Policies for format, reviewing and publication can be different for each portal, and are decided by the institution.

The majority of content within a portal is built from expositions that are published in the portal or connected to it. The portal admin is a special user role that controls the appearance of the portal, its users and the publication and connection of expositions to it.

Purpose of a Portal

For more information on portal partnership and its benefits: https://societyforartisticresearch.org/rc/portal-partnership/.

Portal pages

The portals can be accessed through the front page of the RC, in three categories:

These categories only differentiate the function of the portal, in terms of user interface they all work in the same manner. By default, the portal pages (or portal feeds) will display the institutional information, recent publication and research groups of the portal. However, once a portal has grown, more customized structures are also possible, using the feeds option, for example. To keep things simple however, we will start with the basics.

Functionalities of a portal

A portal in the research catalogue provides the following functionalities:

Internal versus external portal

Content of a portal may be visible internally (only visible to members), externally (visible to all) or archived (hidden, only visible to admins). If desired, SAR allows institutions to create separate portals for either of these to keep them more separate.

Initial set-up

The Research Catalogue provides an automatically generated landing page that displays a logo, description and public expositions associated with the portal that have been modified.

You can configure some aspects of this page by opening the “portals” functionality within the profile menu of your admin account, then click the little page icon to open the portal settings. Here you can provide a description, logo and manage roles. For more info, consult the portal reference section.

Important: if a portal is new, the portal will not listed on the RC until you inform SAR (info@societyforartisticresearch.org) that it has some content and can be made visible.

Portal workflow tutorial

The basic workflow of a portal consists of the following:

admin account password

As an admin account has special abilities, it is very important that you use a strong password for your portal admin account, as admininstration rights should not come in the wrong hands. You can change your password under settings. It is recommended to use a password manager (most browsers have this built-in) or a secure method like EFF’s dice based generator.

Creating new users within the portal

Users are created and managed in the “Users” tab of the portal adminstration:
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/admin/user/list

To create a user, click create user at the right top corner of the screen.

This will open a dialog where you can enter the name, email and password for the new user.

If you type the name of a user that already exists under that name in the RC, it will show up below the field, if you click the name and then continue to the next field, the RC will show a pop-up prompting if you want to add this user to your portal. Double accounts should be avoided.

It is recommended to use a throwaway (random) password and ask the new user to set a proper password themselves by using the reset link.

If your institution already uses a single sign on system (MS Teams, Feide), it is also possible to provide a single sign on connection to the RC, please consult SAR for this option.

When a portal admin creates a user, it is important that the admin is sure that the name and email belongs to a real person (for example by linking it with an institutional email account). In case of copyright or other legal problems surrounding an account created by a portal, the portal admin should be able to provide contact information to this person.

Adding Existing Users to your Portal

It is also possible for existing RC users to request membership to a portal on their own account, by clicking “edit portals” on their profile page:

requesting portal membership

The portal admin can accept (or reject, in case the request was made by mistake) such requests through messages.

Roles

A new account can be made as a basic account or a full account. A basic account cannot create or publish content. Basic accounts may be useful in case of creating external reviewers or supervisors.

To give an account the ability to create expositions, you have to disable the “basic account” option like so:

  1. click “edit” next to the user
  2. open the “roles” tab
  3. deselect basic user:
removing the basic user limitation

Writing the Exposition, Collaboration

The next stage is the writing of the exposition itself, by the author.

During the writing stage, it is common that the exposition in progress is shared with one or more other readers or collaborators. These collaborators can use the review notes system to leave feedback. There are three types of collaboration roles:

collaboration tab

See https://guide.researchcatalogue.net/#collaborating-on-research for more.

It is also possible that an author makes the in-progress exposition content visible to specific groups of users, before publication. This is done by using the share option. Since sharing in this manner is not an official publication, shared expositions can be unshared (made private again), and will appear on the author’s profile and not in the portal feed.

Publication or “connecting to” a portal to make expositions visible

There are two methods of making an exposition part of a portal. The most commonly used is publication, which follows a controlled, peer reviewed journal-like methodology. The exposition contents are locked during periods of review and reviewers have an overview page in the RC of expositions they need to review. The goal of such a workflow is a static online publication with a DOI in the portal that cannot be edited again.

The RC also allows for a more informal connection to the portal, this is known as “connecting to” a portal, where the exposition is connected to the portal, becomes visible in its feed, but its contents remains editable. No review workflow is provided, and the author can still change content of such an exposition (or even remove it altogether) after the connection has been made. The “connecting to” workflow is described here.

Below is a diagram of review, “connecting to” and sharing of expositions:

exposition workflows

Reviewing and publication

We will now describe the review and publication workflow of a portal.

The first step is that the author submits the exposition for review by a portal. This is done through the ☰ menu, which is located on the “my profile” in the right bottom corner of the exposition summary. This will open a dialog where a portal can be chosen.

Exposition submission dialog

Once the author has submitted the exposition, no further changes can be made to the exposition by the author. It will be listed on their profile under the status “in review”. The share status and thus visibility will remain unchanged.

The portal admin will receive a message from the RC that a new exposition is ready for review. It will also be available under the “reviewing” section in the admin section, where the whole reviewing procedure will be managed by the portal admin.

The RC automatically creates a snapshot of the exposition when the author submits the exposition for review. This allows to trace between different versions of the exposition later.

If the review request was sent by accident or to the wrong portal, the publication request can be declined by the portal administrator. The admin can also do this under administration > reviewing and clicking the X next to the research title. This will also open the exposition for editing again.

Reviewing, Assigning Reviewers

The next step is to assign reviewers to the exposition. For a person to be available as reviewer, they have to:

  1. have an RC account
  2. be part of the reviewer pool of the portal.

You can do so both in one go, by using “create reviewer” button on the portal “users” list. This will also work for users that have already an account in the RC. The reviewer role does not require a full RC account, a basic account suffices.

For the second requirement, the user has to be added to the reviewer pool of the portal. This can be done by going to the Portal page of the admin section and then choosing edit. Under the ROLES tab, RC users can be added as reviewers for that particular portal.

Once a reviewer is part of the review pool, they can be added to the research exposition. To do this, go to review tab of the administration part of the RC, and click the edit page. Here you can add (or remove) reviewers to the research. Reviewers can be either added single blind (they cannot see each other), or double blind (they cannot see the author’s name).

the edit request page, found when clicking edit icon on an exposition in review

The reviewers will see a list of expositions that they are reviewers of on top of their “my profile” page or https://www.researchcatalogue.net/review.

Within the exposition they can use the “REVIEW” menu to leave notes to themselves, which are only visible to them and the portal administrator. Typically further communication between the portal admin and the reviewer takes place through the messaging system or by e-mail.

Optional revision of exposition content

As stated before, the exposition content is locked for the author(s) during the review process, only the portal admin can edit.

If the author needs to revise the content, it is possible to temporarily open an exposition for editing by clicking the “in revision” button . This will open a dialog where you can put the exposition “in revision”. During revision, the exposition will remain listed in the reviewing page. Once the author is done, they can either resubmit themselves from their profile page, or the administrator can use the button in the “reviewing” page to change the status back to “in review”, and the exposition content is locked again.

Final Publication or Rejection

Once the review process has been completed, the portal can choose to either publish or dismiss the exposition. If the exposition is dismissed, this means that the editing rights are returned to the author. The author can resubmit the same exposition later, at which point the review process starts again. Instead of rejecting, one can also put the exposition “in revision”, which means the author can make changes, while the exposition is still listed on the “reviewing” tab of administration.

If the exposition is accepted, the exposition will be frozen permanently from further changes. You will need to select a range and an issue for the exposition to be published in.

The range controls to who the exposition will be visible:

range who can see it?
Limited to portal Members of the portal can see it
Unlimited All visitors
Archived Portal admins

Tip: When your portal publishes its very first exposition, you will first want to create a new issue in the issue page, since all expositions need to be part of an issue. The issue’s range should match that of the exposition. The default range of an issue is unlimited.

Issues can be used both as a grouping “master research” “research project” etc. or for periodicals like journal issues. This is up to the portal to decide.

Dialog for accepting the publication request

Depending on the portal settings at this point also a DOI will be deposited through Crossref.

Unpublishing

The list of expositions of a portal can be found under expositions. Please note that publishing is meant as a one-way step, unpublishing is to be used only as a very last resort.

If one already expects the exposition will be removed in the future, it should not be published. In that case one could better return the exposition to the author(s) and have them share it using the standard sharing options of the RC.

Immediately after publication the exposition will show up on the RC frontpage (in the case its range is Unlimited). It is recommended that keywords are added to publications, so they can more easily be retrieved. Keywords can also be added after publication, on the research list.

Connecting an exposition to the portal

The key aspect of a typical exposition publication in an RC portal is that it results in a permanent online object.

However, sometimes, it is useful to make an exposition visible on the portal page while it is still being written. For example, in the case of an ongoing research project, where results are being added in a continuous fashion.

In this case, the author can request an exposition to be “connected to”. The portal admin will be able to accept such a request by accepting it here:
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/admin/part-of-requests/list “Connecting to” a portal is only possible if the exposition has a minimum of visiblity. This means the exposition has to be shared within the portal, or fully public.

Portal feed

A portal feed that provides basic information about the institutions, recently edited content, publications and research groups within the RC portal.

Administration reference guide

Administration Main Page

Once you are an administrator of the RC, the administration functions will appear under your “profile” button. Once you are in any of the administration pages, you can also switch between them by clicking the headers within the administration interface. To return to your own profile, you can click on the Research Catalogue logo.

admin main page

There are 5 pages to manage content for portal admins:

Multiple Portals:

If you are an admin in multiple portals, you can switch between them in the top right corner of the site, through the drop down menu.

User Page / User list

admin user page
Action Icon
Add a user
Edit a user
Remove user from portal
Login as a user

Note: it is not possible for a portal admin to fully delete an account, however, the RC superadmin can delete an account if necessary. Please contact support if the need arises (for example, duplicate accounts).

Add / Edit A User Dialog

Important: when you type a new user name, the RC tries to find if the user exists already. If it does, the RC will show a dialog requesting if you want to add the existing user to the portal instead of creating a new account. It is highly discouraged for a single person to have two accounts on the RC, so normally admins are expected to simply add this existing account.

Profile

user profile dialog

Change the name, alias, email and password (optional). An administrator can also change these fields without having to change the password (by leaving the field empty).

Portal

user portal settings dialog

This controls to which portals a user is added. A user can be added to multiple portals at once. Portals which are selected are marked by a gray background.

Roles

user role settings dialog

When the option is turned on, the user cannot create any content. This is the default when a user has registered an account by themselves. Limited users can still become supervisors, read expositions or added as reviewers. To allow users to create expositions, works and applications, you have to turn this option OFF.

Settings

user email settings dialog

Here you can set which emails the user should receive.

Portal page

The portal tab shows you which users are administrators on the portal. It has 3 actions:

Action Icon
Portal mail
Edit portal settings
Delete a portal

Portal mail

portal mail dialog

For advanced layout, you can use the HTML button. Images need to be small and embedded as URI

Note that for RC wide mailings, one should always use the JAR Template and type = Announcement setting. This makes the mailing include an unsubscribe link, that is required by EU law. All other combinations of settings will currently not include this link !

The JAR Template includes several standard fields (title, contact and a banner image), be sure to check that you are not adding duplicates in the email body text itself. One should always test before requesting it to be sent out.

The announcement option has to be scheduled at least 1 day in advance. The sending of the email will have to be approved by SAR.

Portal Edit Screen

Common

portal edit common screen

Here you can edit the basic information of the portal, which is displayed on the RC’s internal page. You can also replace this internal page with an external page if desired. See external link option

View text allows you to change the template that is used in the navigation bar of expositions: this is the quotation information the reader sees when they move their mouse to the top of the screen. available placeholders:

Roles

portal edit roles

Here you can edit the various roles of the portal:

Templates

Portal admins can select any of their Text based expositions to be available as templates for users within their portal. This allows users to start with a predifined CSS sheet or even content.

Portal Settings

portal edit submissions

Here you can set which objects can be submitted to the portal.

allow

allow connection of

allow publishing

Research page

Here you can manage all research connected to the portal. Expositions are sorted per issue. Those without a publishing date, have not been published yet. There are a number of actions available:

Action Icon
Edit
Unpublish
Comment
Block

Unpublishing an exposition

The unpublishing of expositions is not encuraged. Published expositions are supposed to be a permament reference, never to be deleted or changed. If an exposition is to be continuously changed or temporary, it is better to not publish, but simply set its sharing settings to public. When unpublishing an exposition make sure with the author of the exposition that there are no connected works that have been deleted since, otherwise it may be impossible to reconstruct the publication.

Connection Requests

It is possible for users to connect a work or exposition to a portal. The works that have been accepted by an admin of the portal will be listed here.

A connected exposition will appear on the Portal’s landing page, and the metadata of the exposition will now mention that is connected to the portal. They will also appear when searching for expositions within the portal.

Requests can be accepted with: V or rejected with: X.

Once research is connected, the portal admin can add an Editor role to the expositions. The editor is than able to change the content within the exposition.

They can also add Supervisor role, which can only read the exposition.

Reviewing (admin)

The reviewing page allows managment of expositions that have been applied for publication by the author. Reviewers or editors can be assigned to these works. When a reviewer is added they will automatically recieve a notification from RC that they have been added. Reviewers can leave notes only visible to themselves (so not to other reviewers) and the portal admin(s).

Actions that are available:

Action Icon Description
edit Add reviewers and/or editors
accept Accept publication request
reject Reject publication request
change status Put exposition in revision
export Export the exposition as zip

In revision

It is possible to put an exposition “in revision”, this means the author can change the content again, but the exposition remains in the list on the reviewing page (so the admin can keep track of the progress).

You will be able to include a message to author, so they are informed that they can edit the exposition again.

During revision, reviewers will not be able to access the exposition. They will regain access when the status is changed back to “in review”. This to ensure that no reviewer is reading an exposition that is currently being edited. Reviewers’ comments (“yellow sticky notes”) will be invisible to the author; notes from the portal admin and editors will be visible to the author.

Either the author can resubmit the exposition using the hamburger menu, or the portal admin can change the status using the change status action button:

Publication dialog

When a publication request is accepted, the portal admin can choose to which issue it belongs and if the publication should be local to the portal (limited publication) or public (the whole world). Issues can be created using the issue page. You can also write a custom message to the author.

publication dialog

Issue page

The Issue page is an overview page within the RC that shows all published expositions that are part of an issue.

An Issue page consists of the title and description of the issue itself and a gridded preview of all the expositions (title, author, abstract and a thumbnail). This page is responsive so is easy to read on a phone as well.

Issues names are managed on this here.

In the issue section (between “portal” and “research”) of the administration interface, the number, title and description of issues can be edited.

edit issue dialog

For the reader, issues can be found through the portals front page.

Groups

On the group overview page portal admins can create, edit and remove groups. A group can only be deleted if it no longer has users or expositions connected to it.

edit group dialog

Using JSON Feeds

The search functionality of the RC allows you to export metadata of the portal in JSON format. You can construct a normal query by going to advanced search from the front page, and select JSON as the output. The results are always pages with a maximum of 250 results per page.

Here is an example query, to show the 25 most recent publications in the RC: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/portal/search-result?fulltext=&title=&autocomplete=&keyword=&portal=&statusprogress=0&statuspublished=0&statuspublished=1&includelimited=0&includeprivate=0&type_research=research&resulttype=research&modifiedafter=&modifiedbefore=&format=json&limit=25&page=0

The JSON has the following format: id : this is the RC ID, which can also be used to construct links, since it will never change.

type : exposition / work /

title : the full title of the exposition

thumb : (optional) a thumbnail image of the exposition, as provided by the author

default-page : the first page of the exposition

keywords : open keywords added by the author or admin, note that this is not a protected vocabulary.

created : date of creation of the exposition DD/MM/YYYY

status : - in progress : still being edited, can also be deleted - published : a permanent exposition, will not be edited or removed

doi : if published, most expsoitions will have a DOI.

published in: This shows in which portal(s) the exposition is published in

connected_to: This shows to which portal(s) the exposition is connected to

license:

see details in licences

issue: Portals in the RC always publish their expositions as part of Issues. For journals these can mean issue as in journal issue, however, other portals also use it to distinguish between different variaties of research (student, staff, 3rd cycle etc..)

author: Internal RC ID (can be used to construct author profile link: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/?person=[id] ) This user will also be the owner (the user that can publish, delete and rename the exposition and controls who is ).

coauthor: The other authors of the exposition.

last-modified: The last modification date, as a POSIX timestamp of the last modification date. The timezone of this value is CEST.

More Help

Changelog

In Development

For the latest updates on RC development, visit: https://societyforartisticresearch.github.io/rclogbook/

  1. It is not possible to have both at the same time.↩︎