Project Bamboo partners gathered in late July in Evanston, Illinois to complete plans for the current work (Phase One) and begin planning for the next phase. Currently in the eleventh month of our eighteen-month initial phase, team members reviewed development progress, planned future pilot testing, and began to map out deployment strategies for the Bamboo ecosystem technologies.
Project Bamboo designed Phase One with four audiences in mind: traditional humanities scholars; humanities scholars who are deeply engaged with digital technologies; librarians and content stewards who seek to share content and support the humanities; and information scientists, tool builders, and enterprise technologists who want to further the evolution of tools and shared infrastructure for the humanities. These various groups will continue to be our target audiences as the project moves forward into the next phase of development.
In Phase One, we intentionally invested in a broad set of work with the goal of (1) integrating these initiatives into a larger ecosystem of environments, content, and tools, and (2) evaluating these diversified investments to see what was paying off and what is most needed for the next major phase of work. In Phase Two, we will continue to build out these initiatives and place significant focus on their integration. Decisions from the Evanston meeting include:
● During the next phase of work, Project Bamboo will begin to implement the architectural designs that came out of Corpora Space.
● As we move further into technical development, Project Bamboo plans to upload several demonstrators to demos.projectbamboo.org this Autumn. Stay tuned to the blog for announcements of these releases.
● Building a stronger and larger consortium is a major goal of Project Bamboo, and we will continue to evolve opportunities for groups to join as affiliates. By partnering with collections, libraries, humanities organizations, universities and others, we hope to broaden our user base and build long term stability. In addition to our partnerships with HathiTrust Research Center, Perseus Digital Library, and the Text Creation Partnership, the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC), at Texas A&M University, and the University of Alabama have recently joined as affiliates.
In the meantime, we invite you to explore our Places-Text demonstrator, featured here on this blog, and to follow the latest project updates on Twitter @projectbamboo.
