In mid-September, Project Bamboo partners gathered at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities for the next stage of planning for Phase Two of the project. In this workshop we took significant steps toward solidifying our Phase Two goals, mapping out a work plan, and preparing the proposal that will be submitted to the Mellon Foundation.

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!