Several Project Bamboo members are currently in Seattle, WA at the 2012 Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention. Those attending include Neil Fraistat (University of Maryland), who is participating in a panel discussion on “#alt-ac: The Future of ‘Alternative Academic’ Careers”; Harriett Green (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), whose paper “Collaborative Economies: Tools and Strategies for Scholars and Libraries” highlights Project Bamboo and the study she is conducting on scholars and digital collections; and Quinn Dombrowski (University of Chicago) who is representing Bamboo DiRT. Neil and Quinn also participated in a day-long DHCommons pre-conference workshop. Say hello to Neil (@fraistat), Harriett (@greenharr), and Quinn (@quinnanya) at MLA, and follow their conversations on Twitter.

Project Bamboo has established an Affiliates program as a way to involve non-partner institutions who have similar interests and goals to Project Bamboo. We hope that these partnerships will mutually serve and benefit each party, creating long-term sustainability for the future.

NINES (Nineteenth-century Scholarship Online) supported by the University of Virginia and the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) supported by the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture at Texas A&M University, taken together, serve as one example of alignment with Project Bamboo. The University of Alabama is also currently aligned with Project Bamboo. NINES/ARC members act as feedback channels for Bamboo by providing guidance towards scholars’ needs for Bamboo tool builders. The University of Alabama is participating in the pilot planning for Bamboo and is also contributing to the development of Bamboo DiRT. Alabama will be an early adopter of Bamboo DiRT, to meet the needs of their faculty and students in coordination with the Digital Humanities Center in the University Libraries. To learn more on Bamboo DiRT please read the recent post by Quinn Dombrowski, who is assisting the development of Bamboo DiRT.

I recently spoke to Laura Mandell, professor of English at Texas A&M University and director of ARC, on how ARC and Project Bamboo may mutually serve their communities. As a ground-up, scholarly-driven organization, Mandell sees ARC as being able to “bring the scholarly user base to Bamboo” and using Project Bamboo “to hook people up to the larger Digital Humanities community.” ARC will assist Project Bamboo in building a network by disseminating and providing test beds for technology developed through Bamboo.

Mandell says, “ARC and Bamboo are working together to shape the datasets that scholars have access to, so that they meet the highest standards and are findable. As things become digitized, search and research are not as separate as they were in the era of the book. We need to bring scholarly expertise back into the conversation; we’re working towards the same goal and hoping to meet in the middle.” Project Bamboo recognizes the advantages that both technologists and humanists bring to the table. Through the development of accessible, digital tools that focus on texts, we hope to incorporate the strengths of text-analysis, corpus search, and visualization, to allow a scholar to discover and curate content in new and exciting ways.

At the University of Alabama, Thomas C. Wilson, Associate Dean for Library Technology, has led a series of discussion initiatives with faculty and technologists on how scholarship needs may be better met at the university level. Faculty have voiced requests for a “sand-box type environment to experiment, play, learn and process.” Wilson says, “We are lacking a space where individual scholars can go, in an ad hoc way, connect with a collection, and apply tools to the collections.” This is where Project Bamboo comes in: we are in the process of building a coordinated infrastructure for scholars to take advantage of digital tool and service functionality in a research environment. By giving scholars access to collections, Bamboo is setting up a virtual space for scholars to “experiment, play, learn and process.”

Bamboo looks not only to work with faculty, but all players across the humanities — whether they be librarians, students, or the lone scholar. The strength of the digital humanities field lies in its collaborations. Project Bamboo seeks to assist these various forms of collaboration — from faculty member to librarian, teacher to student, scholar to collection, and scholar to scholar — in order to transform the future of humanities scholarship in the digital age. The Bamboo Affiliates program is one visible and concrete commitment to collaboration going forward.

Jim Muehlenberg, Assistant Director for Academic Technology at University of Wisconsin-Madison, is leading the Bamboo Affiliates program. Muehlenberg says, “We look forward to expanding the Affiliates model to humanists at smaller liberal arts colleges, many of which were active participants in the Bamboo Planning Project; we’ve been in conversation with leaders in the NITLE organization to find an effective approach to reach these scholars. The Bamboo Affiliates model should serve us well as we complete the current phase of Bamboo and enter into Phase II, and will be a cornerstone towards the project’s sustainability into the future.”

Over the course of the next few months, we will be releasing a series of demonstrators, that highlight what tools and services we are building to meet scholars’ needs. Please stay tuned to the project wiki and our website to see how you may join the Bamboo community.

Later this week I will be attending the 2nd International Culture and Computing Conference at the University of Kyoto and presenting the paper “Diggable Data, Scalable Reading, and New Humanities Scholarship.” Digital Humanities is rapidly gaining a foothold in Japanese academic scholarship, and this conference features a strand devoted to new methodologies, ideas and outcomes that arise from the application of digital methods.

In this paper, co-written with Neil Fraistat, we address two interrelated gains of the digital turn in humanities scholarship – one political and the other intellectual. First is the popularizing of humanities scholarship through the opening of opportunities for transmission of sources and outputs of digital scholarship. The paper then looks at some approaches to big data in the humanities, critiquing their value and pointing to some of the methodological questions they raise. It then goes on to argue for digital textual scholarship that can move from the massive to the particular, borrowing a phrase from Martin Mueller to argue for ‘scalable reading’, ultimately explaining how Project Bamboo will support the opening up of scholarship and scalable reading through digital means.

In a 1935 article in the Yale Review the historian Robert C. Binkley wrote, “Micro-copying is a technique that will… give the reader exactly what he wants, and bring it to him wherever he wants to use it.” Binkley was an advocate of democratizing scholarship through the application of the new media technologies of the first half of the twentieth century. Similar arguments are often made today by advocates of the digital humanities. There are strong parallels between Binkley’s approach and the gains in public humanities that have arisen from the digitization of the artifacts of human culture. The ease of transmission and the relatively low-cost of delivery that digitized works allow has a democratizing effect on scholarship, engaging a much broader public in a range of scholarly activities.

The Google Ngram Viewer brought the idea of using computation to study culture to many who had previously been unaware of its potentials. The Ngram Viewer is based around a very simple idea: type in two or more words and you get a comparison of their occurrence in the Google Books corpora over time. A range of questions of interest to humanities scholars is possible: When did a word enter common usage? When did words fall out of favor? What is the historical trajectory of a concept in, for example, nineteenth-century politics? How much were people writing about a literary figure, or a work of fiction?

The paper critiques this and several other approaches to the use of big data in the analysis of texts – including Franco Moretti’s ‘Distant Reading’ of literary history – and then builds on these to argue for ‘scalable’ textual scholarship. Scalability in this context utilizes new computational approaches that allow for the interrogation of massive text objects far beyond the capability of the individual reader, while simultaneously allowing for traditional forms of close reading. Rather than only providing the opportunity for abstraction of many texts it should be possible for scholars to investigate closely the component parts that the computer utilized in obtaining the abstraction. For every step away from the text the scholar will be provided with the means to step back into the text and see the passage, stanza or phrase that is represented in the abstraction.

editor’s note: This post originally appeared on the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities blog on October 18, 2011.

Digital information held by libraries, museums and archives is typically isolated in individual repositories making cross-repository searching difficult, if not impossible. Users of digital resources including humanities scholars, however, often search for information or resources pertinent to their field of endeavor irrespective of where the data is held. The establishment of collection description registries, such as Research Data Australia, goes someway towards solving this problem by aggregating descriptions of datasets held by individual repositories in a structured and coherent manner to promote the reuse of data.

In the Bamboo Technology Project environment, there is a need for data to be discoverable for computer-mediated use and reuse across collections. This requires that collection descriptions include machine actionable descriptions of collection services, as well as human readable descriptions of data holdings.

Describing Collections and Collection Services for the BTP suggests that a greater use of semantic web technologies, including RDF encoding for Registry Interchange Format – Collection and Services (RIF-CS), would simplify computer mediated use and reuse of data, particularly the automatic linking of services and data. Given the centrality of both collection interoperability, as well as data use and reuse to the Bamboo Technology Project, the adoption of an RDF encoding of an established schema such as RIF-CS for data collections would greatly aid the process of discovery as applied to both data and services.

editor’s note: Describing Collections and Collection Services for the BTP, authored by Timothy W. Cole (University of Illinois), Myung-Ja Han (University of Illinois), Doug Moncur (The Australian National University), and Harriett E. Green (University of Illinois), was presented by MJ Han and Doug Moncur at the recent DCMI International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, The Hague, September 22, 2011.