Providing ‘single-source’ support for a wide range of tools eliminates the need for each toolmaker to ‘reinvent’ these basic needs over and over again. Our goal is to enable scholars to access a broad range of tools without having to install and run them on their own machines, or in their own universities’ data centers; while empowering developers to contribute to a shared body of stable curatorial, analytic, semantic, collections interoperability, and trust services that are readily accessible to humanists.

We’re calling the server that hosts these services the “Bamboo Services Platform” (BSP). It serves as an integration broker – the technology that mediates interaction between independent tools, environments, and content repositories that participate in the Project Bamboo Ecosystem. These include:

• Services developed (and in some cases run) by other, often long-standing humanities projects; the Morphology and Syntactic Annotation services described below fall into this category.
• General-purpose applications, such as the research environments that we’ve been calling “Work Spaces,” being built as adaptations of best-of-breed Open Source platforms for managing and analyzing digital content.
• Collections of content owned or hosted by a diverse range of repositories, such as HathiTrust and the Perseus Digital Library.

Two Scholarly Services are currently running on the BSP in an “alpha” stage of development. These are the Morphology and Syntactic Annotation services developed by Tufts University under the leadership of Greg Crane.

The Syntactic Annotation service provides a ‘single-source’ API from which scholars can retrieve syntactic annotations from a range of annotation repositories in multiple formats. A scholar may obtain a template for annotating a document or text fragment that she provides.

The Morphology service is a ‘single-source’ API to multiple morphological analysis engines. Individual words, blocks of XML-encoded text, or documents from a variety of repositories can be analyzed.

Detailed examples of how each of these services work in their current “alpha” state can be found in a late-September blog post on Project Bamboo’s Tech Wiki, Alpha Releases of Morphology and Syntactic Annotation Services.

Additional Scholarly Services on Project Bamboo’s roadmap for the current grant period include concordance, collocation table, and frequency table services that draw on Philologic indexing and analysis; as well as a Places-Texts service that will identify place names in texts and provide geolocation metadata about them, using a variety of geoparsers and gazetteers (see Eric Kansa’s June 1 blog on this site, Places in Texts: Illustrating a Prospective Project Bamboo Service).

Over the course of the summer and early fall, an initial instance of the BSP was made available to developers, and architectural design for ecosystem-wide identity management, group management, access policy management, and user profiles was completed.

By the end of the year, a Proof of Concept (PoC) integration of ecosystem elements will be demonstrated. From a Project Bamboo Work Space, a scholar will be able to gather a collection of texts via the Bamboo Collections Interoperability (CI) Hub and perform operations on those texts using tools and services provided by the BSP, by the Work Space, and by servers outside the Project Bamboo ecosystem. For example, a scholar will be able to retrieve a TEI document from the Perseus Digital Library or Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) through the CI Hub; use the BSP-hosted Syntactic Annotation service to prepare the document; then manually parse the sentences (or correct automatically generated parses) in the prepared document, using the externally-hosted Alpheios Treebank Editor. Syntactic annotations created by the scholar can then be stored in a Bamboo research environment (Work Space), or used as input to additional analytic or visualization tools.

Follow Scholarly Services and BSP work on the Project Bamboo wiki, and on Twitter @projectbamboo.

Steve Masover is IT Architect at University of California, Berkeley.

Concatenability is the most salient advantage of the digital surrogate. Consider the extraordinary power of the ‘cat’ command in the Unix operating system. The command

cat text1 text2  …. textn

will “catenate”  the content of  n texts and turn them into a single “text.” Now you can treat this collection of texts as if they were one.

If you think of ‘cat’ as an abbreviation of  ‘catalogue’, the command simply describes what libraries have done for centuries. When you catalogue books and turn them into a “library” you create a single entity in which the different books are the ordered pages of one Big Book.

The Big Book created by “catenating” digital files supports forms of “reading” that are not constrained by what human eyes and hands can see or hold. They are constrained by the power of the algorithms that machines can perform. As an IBM executive once remarked, machines are fast but dumb, while people are smart but slow. How do you put the dumb but fast machine in the service of the smart but slow human reader?

From a scholar’s perspective this remains an uninteresting question as long as you think of the machine as just another device for delivering individual “books” that are then read in the conventional way. Scholars certainly have a keen interest in having more books delivered faster, cheaper, and without hassle, but they don’t care how it is done as long as it is done.

Things become more interesting if you ask what you can do with texts in a digital Big Book that you could not do with them in the Big Book of a traditional library. That question in turn is complicated by the question what you must “do to” those texts before they release their query potential as a single and digital Big Book.

Which brings us to the Text Creation Partnership. Project Bamboo will work with some 2,000 18th-century texts (ECCO-TCP) that have recently released into the public domain, but in the long run the results of that work may matter even more to the much larger EEBO-TCP archive to which they can be applied. The EEBO-TCP archive currently consists of some 30,000 texts published before 1700 and is likely to double in size by 2015.  It will by then include at least one version of just about every book published before 1700. Starting in 2015, all these texts will move into the public domain, amounting to a virtually complete coverage of the first two centuries of print culture in English.

The most significant added value of the TCP archive will be the ability to treat 70,000 texts as if they were one Book of Early Modern English, but the realization of that value will depend critically on providing the digital equivalents of the complex indexes that have for centuries enhanced the usability of scholarly books. At the moment, the delivery of TCP texts to readers depends on some very generic forms of indexing in which the machine keeps track of the occurrence of the various spellings or character strings. Such indexing works well enough where readers can assume that the same word is spelled in the same way–a highly problematical assumption for texts before 1700. But even where it works, it works in very rough ways. A human reader looking at a printed page can tell right away whether a word occurs in prose or verse, in a footnote, heading, or other form of paratext, belongs to another language, needs to be tacitly corrected because it is misspelled or represents an orthographic variant, and so forth.

Sophisticated indexing of a Book of Early Modern English will consist of techniques that let machines identify and record explicitly the many differences that human readers tacitly recognize. Such indexing is well within the range of current technology, and many of the conditions for such indexes are already realized in the transcriptions of the TCP texts.

Much of Project Bamboo can be described as an effort to enhance the query potential of primary documents through complex indexes and user-friendly search tools. Indexes and search tools of this type are not tied to particular data sets. What is special about the EEBO-TCP texts is their claim to coverage. When the project is completed, it will be unrivaled in terms of the size of the data for which it will offer virtually complete coverage. There will be many archives that are larger, and there are archives that are more complete (e.g. Old English). But where else will we find virtually complete coverage of the printed record of a culture over more than two centuries?

Fast forward five years to a world in which the EEBO-TCP texts are in the public domain and Project Bamboo has contributed to an environment in which that archive is surrounded by layers of complex but easily searched indexes allowing scholarly minds from all walks of life to traverse genres and generations of Early Modern writing and get query results (not quite the same as answers to questions) within seconds or minutes (and occasionally hours).  It will take considerable labor and ingenuity to build the indexes and tools, but if that work is done well it will be a worthwhile achievement, putting within reach of ambitious minds what was previously impracticable and observing the fourth of Ranganathan’s lapidary and charming laws of library science: “save the time of the reader.”

Martin Mueller is a professor of English at Northwestern University.

The reason we ask is twofold: First, we’d like to know what types of digital collections should be prepared and incorporated into the Bamboo research platform. While there are a few all-encompassing general digital collections, such as the Hathi Trust Digital Library, there are many more digital collections with limited content or specialized focuses, and it is hard to determine how to select collections for incorporation into Bamboo.

Secondly, a larger question faces libraries and digital libraries about effective collection development strategies for digital collections: How can we build digital libraries that aren’t simply mass collections of materials or are based on libraries’ classifications, but that directly address scholars’ research needs?

To explore this question, we decided to launch a study that would create a needs assessment for scholars and digital collections. Over the summer, I worked with Indiana University librarian Angela Courtney to contact humanities librarians, digital humanities coordinators, and academic technologists at the twelve member institutions of the CIC academic consortium and participating Bamboo partner institutions.  We ultimately convinced nine librarians and staffers to work with us on conducting a survey and interviews with their humanities faculty. The participating institutions are the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Michigan State University, University of Iowa, University of Chicago, University of Minnesota, Penn State University, and the University of Maryland.

After months of IRB wrangling, writing the test instruments, pre-testing, and consultations, we launched the study in late October. A survey has been distributed to randomly selected faculty members in all of the English and history departments at the aforementioned institutions, and will run through December. Interviews will be conducted in November and December with select faculty members from fine arts and performing arts departments on the campuses who are involved in digital scholarship.  Follow-up interviews will also be conducted with survey respondents who indicated a willingness to be interviewed.

We anticipate that this study will enable us to gain new insights into the transformations occurring in humanities research with the advent of digitized materials. An update will be forthcoming as results are analyzed this winter, and we’re excited for what the data will tell us!

Harriett Green is English and Digital Humanities Librarian at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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.

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.

In response to this feedback from the planning workshops, Project Bamboo is developing a tool, service, and collection registry application that accommodates both the individual scholar looking for information and other platforms that could access and/or ingest the information. This application can serve as a resource discovery and tip-sharing tool for scholars, and a source of feedback for developers. For its user-facing side, this application builds upon the well-known Digital Research Tools (DiRT) wiki, a partnership reflected in its tentative name, Bamboo DiRT.

While the tools, services and collections developed by Project Bamboo are represented in Bamboo DiRT, this application also aims to capture the broader ecosystem of resources used by digital humanists and includes entries drawn from the DiRT wiki, Humanist listhost, DH Answers, and other discussion fora. Each entry includes as much information as possible about the resource, including a prose description, supported platform(s), cost, screenshots, and technical information. While Bamboo DiRT is not itself a documentation repository, it contains fields for links to end-user, API, and general technical documentation. Authenticated users can indicate that they use a particular resource (following the model of the “like” button) and add tips for other users of that resource.

The development goals for Bamboo DiRT include a robust API that will lay the groundwork for integrating Bamboo DiRT information with the Bamboo Work Spaces and affiliated digital humanities websites built on common platforms (Drupal and WordPress). For example, projects listed on DHCommons that use a particular tool could be automatically listed alongside the tool’s entry on Bamboo DiRT. CUNY Academic Commons users could search Bamboo DiRT within the Commons, and the tools they’ve indicated they use could be listed in their profile. By participating in a rich ecosystem of data exchange, Bamboo DiRT will help users build upon each others’ workflows, whether or not they involve Bamboo tools and services.

As part of Project Bamboo, a team from UC Berkeley Information Services and Technology is working with the University of California Curation Center (UC3) and Alfresco Professional Services to make available exciting new data management services for arts and humanities scholars. When fully realized, scholars will be able to easily migrate research data from Work Spaces to the UC3 Merritt repository for long-term access and preservation. Data moved to the Merritt repository will be assigned a persistent identifier (DOI), which can be used to cite data with confidence.

Scholars need to know that the underlying data supporting their publications will be around for the long term. With new tools and standards for data publication, their data can be reused and verified, its impact measured, and their contributions recognized and rewarded. Many funding agencies are now mandating, where sensible, broad public dissemination of the products of research. This solution should go a long way towards meeting the needs of the academic community, funders and other stakeholders.

We are currently working towards a technical proof of concept, with the objective of being able to move content (data and metadata) from the Alfresco-based Bamboo Work Space to the UC3 Merritt repository. We expect to have this technical proof of concept ready by late October 2011. We will then work towards a more functional beta release (December 2011), which we expect to pilot during the spring 2012 semester. Our code and overall approach will serve as a template for connecting to other web-based scholarly services.

To read further on Alfresco-based Bamboo work please visit:
ECM Work Spaces REST Integration Page: https://wiki.projectbamboo.org/x/diB4AQ
Contact: Noah Wittman (wittman<at>berkeley<dot>edu)

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.

Our work in Phase II will be focused on building an infrastructure to support the exploration and curation of digital texts from a range of collections that play a key role in the research of scholars from across the humanities. This will include collections that we have been working with in the current phase — such as the HathiTrust Research Center, the Perseus Digital Library, and the Text Creation Partnership — but we will also be reaching out to other content providers in order to maximize the scholarly value of the tools and services we are developing and deploying.

Project Bamboo is also committed to reaching a wider audience in this next phase, ranging from the professional humanist to the citizen scholar. To this end we will develop applications which will be available for use by anyone who wants to explore, analyze, and enhance these text collections. We strongly believe that students at all levels and scholars from outside of the academy can play an important role in the ongoing task of preserving the record of human culture — including the content of these key text collections.

While we recognize the challenges involved in this vision for Phase Two, we will be building on the network of partnerships, systems, and architecture that we have developed during the current phase. Stay tuned to this blog for more news about our ongoing work and our plans for the future!