Project Bamboo is working to model existing digital humanities tools as web services that can be accessed from a server that adds value to the tools by supporting basic functionality required across many tools, such as authentication, authorization, and the ability to store the results of long-running processes for later retrieval. We’re calling them Scholarly Services to differentiate them from basic functionality that supports tools of more direct interest to humanist scholars.

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.