Research Applications

Overview

The BTP is developing applications that scholars will use to further their research by enabling them to easily collaborate within and across institutions, save and operate on their personal research materials, access and analyze distant content and collections and provide insight into other tools and scholarly work in their field that might be of interest to them.

Research Environments

Project Bamboo research environments can be used by humanities researchers to store and organize sets of digital content, e.g. text, images, video and audio; to create, maintain, and search rich metadata about this content; to annotate and analyze content; and to accomplish these through collaboration with other scholars.

During Phase 1, we will build these environments by extending and customizing two platforms: HUBzero and Alfresco. HUBzero was originally developed for research in the sciences. BTP will adapt it to meet the needs of humanities scholars. Alfresco is an enterprise level content management system that UC Berkeley has been adapting for campus researchers. BTP will extend the adaptation by focusing on the specific needs of humanities scholars.

Future Directions

We’re exploring the needs, possibilities and challenges required for implementing powerful web-based applications for research across multiple and dispersed corpora. During our current phase of funding (Q4 2010-Q1 2012), we have a team involved in a design process that will produce detailed roadmaps for building two additional applications. Some of our early efforts are collaborating with the Collections Interoperability team to prioritize which collections to address. Additionally we are focusing on a rapid design process to explore best practices for designing and developing the functionality that these applications will deliver. The entire design process will be a collaboration among BTP partner institutions, individual scholars, and other organizations which are contributing to digital humanities scholarship.

Integrating Data Preservation & Citation Services

We are integrating access to the California Digital Library (CDL) Merritt Repository at the University of California Curation Center (UC3) from the Alfresco ECM Work Space so that users may move content (data and metadata) from a collaborative research environment to a repository for long-term access and preservation. This work with CDL is part of our larger effort to integrate various research environments using RESTful services with a range of collections and tools.

OpenSocial: Build once, apply many

Research is being conducted to enable OpenSocial gadgets to be leveraged within the Project Bamboo research environments and potentially other areas of the Bamboo ecosystem. OpenSocial is a promising approach to enable us to develop functionality once and apply it many times.