From Planning to Implementation

by Tony Cascardi, Principal Investigator

As the new PI for Project Bamboo, it is my pleasure to provide an update on our latest developments. Our current work reflects the goals established during the Bamboo Planning Project, which sought to identify challenges and solutions for scholars, librarians and technologists involved in digital research. From collaborating on ideas and sharing solutions, to increasing tool interoperability across collections, the complex issues brought to light are varied and must be addressed through both technical and community efforts. By focusing on problems surrounding technical infrastructure and partnering with community-oriented efforts, Bamboo is breaking down the barriers to digital research and pedagogy articulated during the Planning Project.

Phase I: Building Cyberinfrastructure

Since receiving funding from the Mellon Foundation in Autumn 2010, Project Bamboo has been developing applications for scholarly use and back-end cyberinfrastructure that will enable innovative use of tools and collections and will further collaboration within and across institutions.

Research Environments

We are building easy-to-use digital research environments to support scholarly research, collaboration and data management. These environments provide gateways to personal content collections, remote content repositories and research tools.

For more information, the HubZero funcional specifications and implementation plans describe one example of a research environment being integrated with the Bamboo ecosystem.

Enabling Research Across Collections

Bamboo’s Content Interoperability (CI) Hub is automating data download and compilation from remote repositories and standardizing format differences. The CI hub currently draws data from TCP-EEBO/ECCO, HathiTrust, Perseus Digital Library, and AustLit.

For more information, read about collections identification and profiling.

Managing Groups and Identity

The Bamboo Person Service links scholars’ various identities (e.g. university and scholarly society) to enable access to authorized resources with a single sign-on. This service also aids group collaboration across institutions.

For more information, read Steve Masover’s blog posts, Logging Into Bamboo – Authentication Use Cases, Asking for Permission – Authorization in the Project Bamboo Ecosystem and The Project Bamboo Trust Federation.

Connecting Tools

A core function of the Bamboo Services Platform enables scholars to seamlessly move their data among interoperable tools instead of importing data separately into stand-alone tools. This function facilitates research and increases the adoption and impact of new and existing tools.

For more information, read about two examples of tools and services being integrated with the Bamboo ecosystem: Tufts’ linguistic analysis services and the Places in Texts service.

Partnering with the Community

The Bamboo Planning Project taught us that digital tools and collections are broadly spread throughout the digital humanities domain. Rather than “reinventing the wheel”, we are partnering with existing efforts to combine resources and more quickly realize powerful results. In addition to building affiliate relationships with ARC, based at Texas A&M University, and the University of Alabama, Bamboo has collaborated with the Digital Research Tools (DiRT) wiki to develop Bamboo DiRT, a rich directory of resources for digital research to which we encourage you to add content. A partnership with DHCommons raises awareness of digital humanities projects.

Get involved

• Visit Bamboo DiRT to explore digital research tools, or create an account and contribute to the site.
• Bamboo DiRT is looking for an editorial board. Interested? Email bamboo-dirt [at] lists.projectbamboo.org.
• Email feedback [at] lists.projectbamboo.org if you’re interested in working with Bamboo as an Affiliate.
• Join one of Bamboo’s topical mailing lists for technical updates.
• Download the PDF of this newsletter and share it widely.